Placement
Students on the Job Market
Students on the Job Market
Information will be updated throughout the summer and fall of 2020.
Accounting & Management
Wei Cai
Abstract:
- Formalizing the Informal: Adopting a Formal Culture-fit Measurement System in the Employee Selection Process
- Many organizations rely on formal management control systems that align employee values with organizational values (i.e., culture-fit) to shape organizational culture. Yet, this role of formal management control systems is understudied in prior research. This paper contributes by examining the employee performance consequences of adopting a formal culture-fit measurement system in the employee selection process using proprietary data from one company. I exploit the staggered feature of the adoption of the system, and find that, on average, employees selected with the system perform significantly better than those without the system. However, the performance consequences of adopting the culture-fit measurement system exhibit significant variation depending on (1) the interaction with the existing subculture, (2) the extent of shared responsibility among employees in the work environment, and (3) the noise in the measurement of culture-fit due to the gaming behavior of applicants. Taken together, this study has important implications for the design of formal management control systems that can facilitate the diffusion of organizational culture.
Jihwon Park
Abstract:
- Does Compliance Training Decrease Corporate Misconduct? Evidence from Field Data”
- Firms spend significant resources on compliance training, but it is often criticized as being cosmetic. Using proprietary records on compliance training and allegations of misconduct from a large multinational firm, I investigate whether compliance training decreases corporate misconduct. I find that in-person training impacts employee behavior but do not find evidence for video training, which indicates that compliance training can be effective when employees are attentive. However, this effect lasts for only two months, suggesting that compliance training only temporarily raises awareness. I also find that the effectiveness of training is curtailed by employees’ economic incentives to misbehave, such as performance pressure and public enforcement strength. Overall, this study advances our understanding of how and when compliance training can impact employee behavior and describes its limitations.
Business Economics
Edoardo Maria Acabbi
Abstract:
- The Financial Channels of Labor Rigidities: Evidence from Portugal (joint with Ettore Panetti and Alessandro Sforza)
- How do credit shocks affect labor market reallocation, firms' exit and other real outcomes? How do labor-market rigidities impact their propagation? To answer these questions, we match administrative data on worker, firms, banks and credit relationships in Portugal, and conduct an event study of the interbank market freeze at the end of 2008. Our results highlight that the credit shock had significant effects on employment dynamics and firms' survival. These findings are entirely driven by the interaction of the credit shock with labor market frictions, determined by rigidities in labor costs and exposure to working-capital financing, which we label labor-as-leverage'' and labor-as-investment'' financial channels. The credit shock explains about 29 percent of the employment loss among large Portuguese firms between 2008 and 2013, and contributes to productivity losses due to increased labor misallocation.
Xiang Ding
Abstract:
- Intangible Economies of Scope: Micro Evidence and Macro Implications
- Do economies of scope within firms affect how macro shocks propagate across industries? I exploit plausibly exogenous variation in foreign demand faced by US multi-industry manufacturers to identify this transmission mechanism. Within the firm, a positive demand shock in one industry increases revenues in another only when both industries use the same intangible inputs. To rationalize these empirical findings, I develop and estimate a general equilibrium model of joint production in which inputs have unrestricted scale and rivalry elasticities within the firm. I find that scope economies are driven by the scalability and non-rivalry of intangible inputs; they account for roughly 20 percent of the aggregate response of productivity to market size. I apply these estimates to study the US-China tariff war and identify alternative tariff policies that mitigate the adverse effects on the US manufacturing CPI.
David Martin
Abstract:
- Discipline Reform, School Culture, and Student Achievement
- o Does relaxing school discipline improve student achievement, or lead to classroom disorder? We study a 2012 reform in New York City public middle schools that eliminated suspensions for non-violent, disorderly behavior, replacing them with less disruptive interventions. Using a difference-in-differences framework, we exploit the sharp timing of the reform and natural variation in its impact to measure the effect of reducing suspensions on student achievement. Math scores of students in more-affected schools rose by 0.05 standard deviations relative to other schools over the three years after the policy change. Reading scores rose by 0.03 standard deviations. Only a small portion of these benefits can be explained by the direct impact of eliminating suspensions on students who would have been suspended under the old policy. Instead, test score gains are associated with improvements in school culture, as measured by the quality of student-teacher relationships and perceptions of safety.
Michael Thaler
Abstract:
- The “Fake News” Effect: An Experiment on Motivated Reasoning and Trust in News
- On many factual questions, people hold beliefs that are biased and polarized in systematic ways. One potential explanation is that when people receive new information, they engage in motivated reasoning by distorting their inference in the direction of beliefs that they are more motivated to hold. This paper develops a model of motivated reasoning and tests its predictions using a large online experiment in the United States. Identifying motivated reasoning from Bayesian updating has posed a challenge in environments where people have preconceived beliefs. I create a new design that overcomes this challenge by analyzing how subjects assess the veracity of information sources that tell them that the median of their belief distribution is too high or too low. In this environment, a Bayesian would infer nothing about the source veracity, but motivated reasoning predicts directional distortions. I reject Bayesian updating in favor of politically-driven motivated reasoning on eight of nine hypothesized topics: immigration, income mobility, racial discrimination, crime, gender-based math ability, climate change, gun laws, and the performance of other subjects. Subjects also engage in motivated reasoning about their own performance. Motivated reasoning from these messages leads people's beliefs to become more polarized and less accurate.
Health Policy (Management)
Maryaline Catillon
Abstract:
- What are the Payoffs for Good Science?: Incentives to Meet Methodological Standards in Clinical Trials
- Randomized controlled trials (RCT) inform medical practice, health care delivery, follow-on research, regulation, and health policy. Yet, many RCTs do not meet consensus scientific standards on randomization, blinding and reporting. To explore scientists' and firms' incentives to meet clinical trial standards, I assemble a detailed database on research methods, experimental results, bibliometric information, and funding for 23,321 RCTs published between 1990 and 2018. I estimate the impact of meeting scientific standards on three outcomes: (1) the direction and significance of experimental results; (2) the impact factor of the publishing journal; and (3) the number of citations the publication receives. I find that increasing numbers of inadequacies increase the probability of finding support for product adoption by 7% per inadequacy, but decrease journal prestige and citations. Publication bias and strategic non-disclosure do not appear to drive the results. My analysis suggests that individual scientists benefit marginally from higher quality research, but that pharmaceutical companies lack strong incentives to drive improvement in trial quality.
Philip Saynisch
Abstract:
- Decomposing Volume’s Impact on Judgment and Skill: Lessons from Kidney Transplantation (with R. Huckman and N. Trichakis)
- In markets for credence goods, such as medical care, suppliers act as not only as providers but also as expert advisors: they diagnose a buyer’s need for a service (i.e., judgment) before providing it (i.e., skill). This dual role of the supplier introduces a crucial complication to learning-by-doing explanations of the volume-outcome relationship, as the observed improvements in outcomes may result from better decision-making or better execution. This paper aims to explore an area of medicine - kidney transplantation - where clinical judgment and surgical skill are clearly delineated and separately observable. We find that greater lagged volume for a given transplant center is predictive of lower rates of organ offer acceptance across the spectrum of organ quality. To assess center performance, we evaluate outcomes along two dimensions following decisions to refuse an offered organ: (1) whether the potential recipient accepted a better-quality organ within one year of a refusal and (2) whether the potential recipient died or was removed from the transplant waitlist for medical reasons within one year of a refusal. We find that larger centers perform worse on both dimensions. We then assess how volume relates to post-surgical outcomes and find evidence of reduced rates of post-transplant death or graft failure within one year at larger transplant centers. This tension between improved skill and reduced judgment quality implies that practice may not make perfect in the context of complex medical care. Experience may need to be supplemented with decision support or other tools to improve outcomes.
Lauren Taylor
Abstract:
- Accepting Tainted Funds: The Especially Difficult Case of Non-Profits
- Non-profits are attracting substantial negative attentions for decisions to accept money from donors accused of wrongdoing. For non-profits, the challenge of deciding under what conditions to accept donated resources fits into a general class of ethical problems related to the lengths economic actors should go to maintain morally clean hands. I describe the unique features of non-profit organizations that make this case particularly vexing and provide a framework by which non-profits can evaluate donations. I argue that donations that violate the Wrongful Benefit Principle should be rejected on the basis that to accept would be intrinsically wrong. Other donations should be evaluated based on a Logic of Double Effect.
Faculty Advisor(s):
David M. Cutler (Chair), Nien-he Hsieh, Christopher Winship, and Margaret E. Kruk
Marketing
Dafna Goor
Abstract:
- The Impostor Syndrome from Luxury Consumption
- The present research proposes that luxury consumption can be a double-edged sword: while luxury consumption yields status benefits, it can also make consumers feel inauthentic, because consumers perceive it as an undue privilege. As a result, paradoxically, luxury consumption may backfire and lead consumers to behave less confidently due to their undermined feelings of self-authenticity. Feelings of inauthenticity from luxury consumption are less pronounced among consumers with high levels of chronic psychological entitlement, and they are reduced when consumers’ sense of entitlement is temporarily boosted. The effects are robust across studies conducted in the lab and in field settings such as the Metropolitan Opera, Martha’s Vineyard, a luxury shopping center, and the Upper East Side in New York, featuring relevant consumption contexts and participant populations including luxury target segments.
Faculty Advisor(s):
Anat Keinan (Co-Chair), Michael I. Norton (Co-Chair), Carey Morewedge, and John T. Gourville
Pavel Kireyev
Abstract:
- Essays on the Design and Industrial Organization of Online Markets
- Contests are a popular mechanism for the procurement of creative innovation. In marketing, firms often organize contests online, offering prizes to encourage competition and solicit high-quality ideas for ads, new products, and even marketing strategies from participants. I empirically investigate the impact of the number of prizes, prize amount and submission limit on participation and quality outcomes in ideation contests using data from a popular marketing crowdsourcing platform. I develop a structural model of participant entry and sponsor choice in contests with multiple prizes and heterogeneous participants. Counterfactual simulations reveal the impact of design parameters on participation and quality outcomes: multiple prizes discourage stronger participants and encourage weaker participants but do not have a substantial impact on outcomes in contests that attract a large number of submissions; a larger prize increases expected maximum, total and average idea quality but may not substantially increase participation; a submission limit increases the number of entrants but reduces expected maximum and total idea quality. The results provide guidance for the optimal design of ideation contests.
Organizational Behavior
Yanhua Bird
Abstract:
- Strategic Downward Selection: Evidence from a Peer-to-peer Platform Market
- Contrary to the general view that market participants seek exchange partners with superior market standing for materials, information, and visibility, this article posits that in some markets in which one’s success depends almost entirely on counterparties’ evaluations—a rarely considered situation in the literature of exchange partner selection—they may seek partners with inferior standing. I propose that concerns regarding evaluations—that will be made by one’s exchange partners after transactions— influence whom one chooses to transact with at the outset. Specifically, market participants infer exchange partners’ evaluation standards from their relative market standing. Comparing themselves with their prospective partners, they anticipate that those with higher market standing are likely to have higher evaluation standards that can be difficult to meet. To reduce evaluation anxiety, they therefore seek partners with inferior standing who are more likely to be satisfied with their offerings and provide positive evaluations. I test these ideas using data on a peer-to-peer lodging platform market in which evaluations are crucial and all participants list their own homes, making it an ideal testing ground. Analysis of user transaction data and interview data strongly supports my prediction: instead of choosing guests with nicer or equivalent homes, a host is more inclined to approve requests from prospective guests with inferior homes. This is more pronounced when the host had recently experienced a decrease in ratings such that the host’s evaluation anxiety is heightened, and when the host is familiar with the comparison group, such as domestic guests, so social comparison is easier. This study contributes to theories of exchange partner selection, evaluation, and commensuration and advances the literature on peer-to-peer economies.
Karen Huang
Abstract:
- Veil-of-ignorance Reasoning Favors the Greater Good
- The “veil of ignorance” is a moral reasoning device designed to promote impartial decision-making by denying decision-makers access to potentially biasing information about who will benefit most or least from the available options. Veil-of-ignorance reasoning was originally applied by philosophers and economists to foundational questions concerning the overall organization of society. Here we apply veil-of-ignorance reasoning in a more focused way to specific moral dilemmas, all of which involve a tension between the greater good and competing moral concerns. Across six experiments (N = 5,690), three pre-registered, we find that veil-of-ignorance reasoning favors the greater good. Participants first engaged in veil-of-ignorance reasoning about a specific dilemma, asking themselves what they would want if they did not know who among those affected they would be. Participants then responded to a more conventional version of the same dilemma with a moral judgment, a policy preference, or an economic choice. Participants who first engaged in veil-of-ignorance reasoning subsequently made more utilitarian choices in response to a classic philosophical dilemma, a medical dilemma, a real donation decision between a more vs. less effective charity, and a policy decision concerning the social dilemma of autonomous vehicles. These effects depend on the impartial thinking induced by veil-of-ignorance reasoning and cannot be explained by a simple anchoring account, probabilistic reasoning, or generic perspective-taking. These studies indicate that veil-of-ignorance reasoning may be a useful tool for decision-makers who wish to make more impartial and/or socially beneficial choices.
Jeffrey Lees
Abstract:
- Moral mind reading: The accuracy of meta-perception and motive attribution in contexts of immoral behavior
- Across two actor and four observer samples we assess the accuracy of actor meta-perception and observe motive-attribution in contexts of immoral behavior. We examine the extent to which immoral actors can accurately predict the moral motive attributions third-party observers will make of their behavior, and the extent to which observers can accurately predict the self-reported motives of immoral actors. Using a direct approach where we solicit instances of immoral behavior and accompanying motives and meta-motives, we find that immoral actors have low levels of meta-perceptive accuracy, whereas observers have low to moderate levels of accuracy in judging the self-reported motives of immoral actors. Further componential analyses of judgment accuracy reveal differential levels of accuracy across motive-valence for both actors and observers, and systematic directional biases in judgments of emotional motives across actors and observers. Accuracy is also positively moderated by trait empathic-concern and cognitive ability, and negatively moderated by trait Machiavellianism and propensity for workplace deviance.
Strategy
Hyunjin Kim
Abstract:
- The Value of Competitor Information: Evidence from a Field Experiment
- Understanding the competitive environment is central to strategic decision-making. To what extent are firms aware of their competitors, and how does information on competitor decisions impact firms’ strategic choices? I explore these questions by running a field experiment in collaboration with Yelp across 3,218 businesses in the personal care industry, where treatment firms receive easily accessible information on their competitors’ prices. At baseline, I find that over 46% of firms are not aware of their competitors’ prices. However, once firms receive competitor information, they are 17% more likely to change their prices, and do so by improving their alignment with competitor offerings. The effect is larger for firms that face higher levels of competition, as well as those showing lower sophistication in pricing, suggesting that a lack of competition or capabilities to use information may not fully explain firms’ lack of knowledge. If competitor information is both decision-relevant and easily accessible, why had firms not invested in this information on their own? Evidence from interviews and a follow-up experiment across control firms suggests that managers appear to have underestimated the value of paying attention to competitor information, because they believed they were already aware of it. These findings suggest that inattention may be a key barrier that leads firms to fail to realize gains from even readily accessible data.
Technology & Operations Management
Grace Gu
Abstract:
- Disintermediation in Online Marketplaces
- As an intermediary improves trust between the two sides of its market to facilitate matching and transactions, it faces an increased risk of disintermediation, where customers and service providers circumvent the platform to transact directly. Using a large-scale randomized control experiment, my dissertation finds that, while improved user trust increases the likelihood of high-quality service providers being hired, it also increases disintermediation, as users have less need for the platform in future transactions. This offsets the revenue gains from hiring more high-quality sellers. These effects are stronger when both sides are geographically proximate to each other, when jobs are highly divisible, and when users have high ratings on the platform. Overall, my dissertation provides important managerial lessons on how platforms can mitigate the tension between trust-building and disintermediation.
James Sappenfield
Abstract:
- The Value of Innovators to Firms: Causal Evidence on Inventor Death and Firm-Level Response
- This study estimates the value of innovative human capital to the firm. To do so, it leverages the unexpected deaths of inventors as a source of exogenous variation in firms’ human capital assets. Employing event study methods, I estimate that the average inventor’s human capital accounts for approximately62% of the value of granted patents and has an asset value of approx. $3 million USD. Analyses show markets anticipate long-run costs of inventor loss. Using a differences-in-differences design, I estimate the impact of inventor death events on treated firms relative to matched control firms. The results show that, following inventor loss, the market valuation of firms’ intangible assets falls as do firms’ gross profits. Additional analyses suggest one potential cause: the loss of inventors leads to significant, lasting decreases in firm innovativeness, even among the deceased’s non-collaborator peers, and these losses likely harm firm competitiveness over the long run.