This paper analyzes the independence of boards of directors as an optimally chosen, non-contractible behavior. A board behaves loyally to a CEO when it agrees to a negative NPV-pro ject, giving the CEO private benefits. While the CEO benefitsfrom competent directors because they help him make...

In this paper we investigate the effect of family connections to politicians on individuals' labor market outcomes. We combine data for Italy over almost three decades from longitudinal social security records on a random sample of around 1 million private sector employees with the universe of...

Merit-based selection of bureaucrats is central to state capacity building, yet rare in developing countries. Most executives instead favor patronage -political discretion- in public employment. This paper proposes and tests an original theory to explain when executives forsake patronage for...

This paper studies firms' decisions to export and invest in R&D and their effects on employment growth and labor flows for a sample of Italian SMEs operating in the manufacturing industry. After accounting for the under-reporting of R&D in SMEs, our quantile regressions reveal that (i) R&D is...

We study whether CEO political ideology affected how S&P 500 firms reacted to the Covid-19 pandemic, an exogenous shock to demand and supply. We hypothesize that conservative CEOs are more likely to adopt shareholder-friendly than employee-friendly reactions to the pandemic. Hence, they should...

Profit-maximizing firms should fill job positions at the lowest possible cost. Because employees may have preferences over the attributes of their jobs, we can view this problem as one of finding the optimal way to sell job attributes to potential employees. In this paper, we characterize the...

This study tests four "light touch" interventions in the language used in job posts of male- dominated occupations to attract female workers using a discrete choice experiment. This experiment had more than 5000 participants from five Latin American countries. We test two possible mechanisms:...