We design a laboratory experiment to identify causal performance effects of top-down communication between managers and their subordinates. Our focus lies on communication that resolves uncertainty about the work environment but does not provide task-specific knowledge. Recent articles in the...

Existing evidence shows that decision-makers' social ties to internal co-workers can lead to reduced firm performance. In this paper, we show that decision-makers' social ties to external transaction partners can also hurt firm performance. Specifically, we use 34 years of data from the National...