We conducted a randomized controlled trial involving nearly 700 customer-service representatives (CSRs) in a Canadian government service agency to study whether providing CSRs with performance feedback with or without peer comparison affected their subsequent organ donor registration rates....

The assignment of workers to tasks and teams is a key margin of firm productivity and a potential source of state effectiveness. This paper investigates whether a low-capacity state can increase its tax revenue by optimally assigning its tax collectors. We study the two-stage random assignment...

Would workers apply to better firms if they were more informed about firm quality? Collaborating with 26 science-based startups, we create a custom job board and invite business school alumni to apply. The job board randomizes across applicants to show coarse expert ratings of all startups'...

We critically review the emerging literature in Organizational and Personnel Economics concerning the role of managers and management practices. Our focus is on the middle managers who populate the hierarchies between top executives and front-line employees. We are especially concerned with...

Wages have been spreading out across workers over time - or in other words, the 90th/50th wage ratio has risen over time. A key question is, has the productivity distribution also spread out across worker skill levels over time? Using our calculations of productivity by skill level for the U.S.,...

This paper studies to what extent the transfer of US managerial technologies to Europe after World War II contributed to closing the gap with US businesses. Between 1952 and 1958, the US government sponsored the Productivity Program, which promoted management training trips for European managers...

We build and analyze a new U.S. database that links 125 million applications to job vacancies and employer-side clients on Dice.com, an online platform for jobs and workers in software design, computer systems, engineering, financial analysis, management consulting, and other occupations that...

This paper presents an analysis of what types of values, especially in regards to obedience vs. independence, families impart to their children and how these values interact with social mobility. In the model, obedience is a useful characteristic for employers, especially when wages are low,...

A person's schooling years are a formative time for cognitive development, and also a period of intense social interaction and friendship formation. In this paper, we estimate the production of social capital during adolescence and its effect on wages. We develop a model where homophily and...

Research into the intergenerational transmission of educational advantage has long been criticized for not paying sufficient attention to genetics. This study is based on the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study (MoBa) and administrative register data on 25000 genotyped Norwegian...