Supervisors occupy central roles in production and performance monitoring. We study how heterogeneity in performance evaluations across supervisors affects employee and supervisor careers and firm outcomes using data on the performance system of a Scandinavian service sector firm. We show that...

Improving public sector workforce quality is challenging in sectors such as education where worker productivity is difficult to assess and manager incentives are muted by political and bureaucratic constraints. In this paper, we study how providing improved information to principals about...

Incentive schemes that reward participants based on their relative performance are often thought to be particularly risk-inducing. Using a novel, real-effort task experiment in the laboratory, we find that the relationship between incentives and risk-taking is more nuanced and depends critically...

We design a model-based field experiment to estimate the nature and magnitude of workers' social preferences towards their employers. We hire 446 workers for a one-time task. Within worker, we vary (i) piece rates; (ii) whether the work has payoffs only for the worker, or also for the employer;...

We use detailed assessments of CEO personalities to explore the option-based measure of CEO overconfidence, Longholder, introduced by Malmendier and Tate (2005a) and widely used in the behavioral corporate finance and economics literatures. Longholder is significantly related to several specific...

We investigate a novel determinant of household financial delinquency, namely, people's subjective expectations regarding the cost-benefit trade-off in default decisions. These expectations are determined by individuals' self-efficacy, which is a non-cognitive ability that measures how strongly...

Evidence from social psychology suggests that agents process information about their own ability in a biased manner. This evidence has motivated exciting research in behavioral economics, but has also garnered critics who point out that it is potentially consistent with standard Bayesian...

A rich literature explores gender differences between men and women, but an increasing share of the population identifies their gender in some other way. Analyzing data on roughly 10,000 students and 1,500 adults, we find that such gender minorities are less confident and provide less favorable...

Youth employment has been near historic lows in recent years, and racial gaps persist. This paper tests whether information frictions limit young people's labor market success with a field experiment involving over 43,000 youth in New York City. We build software that allows employers to quickly...

In applications, interviews, performance reviews, and many other environments, individuals are explicitly asked or implicitly invited to assess their own performance. In a series of experiments, we find that women rate their performance less favorably than equally performing men. This gender gap...