Zoe Cullen graduated with a PhD from Stanford in Economics in 2016. She worked from 2016-2018 as the Chief Economist for an Asian bank on the roll out of a digital transaction platform. In 2018 she joined HBS as an Assistant Professor in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit. Her interests are in the design of labor markets and the choices of employers and labor platforms that affect matters of public interest, such as pay transparency, pay inequality and criminal background screening. She’s an Associate Editor at the Journal of Political Economy.
Alexander Bartik, Marianne Bertrand, Zoë B. Cullen, Edward L. Glaeser, Michael Luca and Christopher Stanton
To explore the impact of COVID on small businesses, we conducted a survey of more than 5,800 small businesses between March 28 and April 4, 2020. Several themes emerged. First, mass layoffs and closures had already occurred—just a few weeks into the crisis. Second, the risk of closure was negatively associated with the expected length of the crisis. Moreover, businesses had widely varying beliefs about the likely duration of COVID-related disruptions. Third, many small businesses are financially fragile: the median business with more than $10,000 in monthly expenses had only about two weeks of cash on hand at the time of the survey. Fourth, the majority of businesses planned to seek funding through the CARES act. However, many anticipated problems with accessing the program, such as bureaucratic hassles and difficulties establishing eligibility. Using experimental variation, we also assess take-up rates and business resilience effects for loans relative to grants-based programs.
We study the growth of online peer-to-peer markets. Using data from TaskRabbit, an expanding marketplace for domestic tasks at the time of our study, we show that growth varies considerably across cities. To disentangle the potential drivers of growth, we look separately at demand and supply imbalances, network effects, and geographic heterogeneity. First, we find that supply is highly elastic: in periods when demand doubles, sellers perform almost twice as many tasks, prices hardly increase, and the probability of requested tasks being matched falls only slightly. The first result implies that in markets where supply can accommodate demand fluctuations, growth relies on attracting buyers at a faster rate than sellers. Second and perhaps most surprisingly, we find no evidence of network effects in matching: doubling the number of buyers and sellers only doubles the number of matches. Third, we show that the cities where market fundamentals promote efficient matching of buyers and sellers are also those that are the fastest-growing. This heterogeneity in matching efficiency is related to two measures of market thickness: geographic density (buyers and sellers living close together) and level of task standardization (buyers requesting homogeneous tasks). Our results have two main implications for peer-to-peer markets in which network effects are limited by the local and time-sensitive nature of the services exchanged. First, marketplace growth largely depends on strategic geographic expansion. Second, a competitive rather than winner-take-all equilibrium may arise in the long run.
Alexander Bartik, Zoë B. Cullen, Edward L. Glaeser, Michael Luca, Christopher Stanton and Adi Sunderam
The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) aimed to quickly deliver hundreds of billions of dollars of loans to small businesses, with the loans administered via private banks. In this paper, we use firm-level data to document the demand and supply of PPP funds. Using an instrumental variables approach, we find that PPP loans led to a 14 to 30 percentage point increase in a business’s expected survival, and a positive but imprecise effect on employment. Moreover, the effects on survival were heterogeneous and highlight an important tradeoff faced by policymakers: while administering the loans via private banks allowed for rapid delivery of funds, it also limited the government’s ability to target the funding—instead allowing pre-existing connections between businesses and banks to determine which firms would benefit from the program.
Alexander Bartik, Zoë Cullen, Edward L. Glaeser, Michael Luca and Christopher Stanton
The threat of COVID-19 has increased the health risks of going to an office or factory, leading more workers to do their jobs remotely. In this paper, we provide results from firm surveys on both small and large businesses on the prevalence and productivity of remote work, and expectations about the persistence of remote work once the COVID-19 crisis ends. We present four main findings. First, while overall levels of remote work are high, there is considerable variation across industries. The Dingel and Neiman (2020) measure of suitability for remote work does a remarkably good job of predicting the industry level patterns of remote work—highlighting the challenge of moving many industries to remote work. Second, remote work is much more common in industries with better educated and better paid workers. Third, in our larger survey, employers think that there has been less productivity loss from remote working in better educated and higher paid industries. Fourth, more than one-third of firms that had employees switch to remote work believe that that remote work will remain more common at their company even after the COVID-19 crisis ends.
Dylan Balla-Elliott, Zoë B. Cullen, Edward L. Glaeser, Michael Luca and Christopher Stanton
How quickly will American businesses reopen after COVID-19 lockdowns end? We use a nationwide survey of small businesses to measure firms’ expectations about their re-opening and future demand. A plurality of firms in our sample expect to reopen within days of the end of legal restrictions, but a sizable minority expect to delay their reopening. While health-related variables, such as COVID-19 case rates and physical proximity of workers, do explain the prevalence and expected duration of regulated lockdown, these variables have little or no correlation with post-lockdown reopening intentions. Instead, almost one half of closed or partially open businesses said that their reopening would depend on the reopening of related businesses, including customers and suppliers. Owners expect demand to be one-third lower than before the crisis through autumn. Firms with more pessimistic expectations about demand predict a later reopening. Using an instrumental variables strategy, we estimate the relationship between demand expectations and reopening. These estimates suggest that post-lockdown delays in reopening can be explained by low levels of expected demand.
Offices are social places. Employees and managers take coffee breaks together, go to lunch,
hang out over drinks, and talk about family and hobbies. In this study, we provide evidence that
employees’ social interactions with their managers can be advantageous for their careers and
that this phenomenon can contribute to the gender pay gap. We use administrative and survey
data from a large financial institution. We conduct an event-study analysis of manager rotation
to estimate the causal effect of managers’ gender on their employees’ career progressions. We
find that male employees assigned to male managers were promoted faster in the following
years than male employees assigned to female managers; female employees, on the contrary,
had the same career progression regardless of their managers’ gender. These differences were
not accompanied by any differences in effort or performance, and they explain a third of the
gender gap in promotions at this firm. Then, we provide evidence suggesting that these effects
were mediated by the social interactions between male employees and male managers. First,
we show that the effects were present only among employees who worked in close proximity
to their managers. Second, we show that the effects coincided with an uptick in the share of
breaks taken with the managers. Third, we estimate the impact of social interactions on career
progression using quasi-random variation induced by smoking habits. When male employees
who smoke transitioned to male managers who smoke, they took breaks with their managers
more often and were subsequently promoted at higher rates than male smokers who transitioned
to non-smoking managers. The boost in socialization and promotion rates closely mirrors the
pattern among male employees assigned a male manager.
The limited diffusion of salary information has implications for labor markets, such as wage discrimination policies and collective bargaining. Access to salary information is believed to be limited and unequal, but there is little direct evidence on the sources of these information frictions. Social scientists have long conjectured that privacy norms around salary (i.e., the “salary taboo”) play an important role. We provide unique evidence of this phenomenon based on a field experiment with 755 employees at a multibillion-dollar corporation. We provide revealed-preference evidence that many employees are unwilling to reveal their salaries to coworkers and reluctant to ask coworkers about their salaries. These frictions are still present, but smaller in magnitude, when sharing information that is less sensitive (seniority information). We discuss implications for pay transparency policies and the gender wage gap.
The vast majority of the pay inequality in an organization comes from differences in pay between employees and their bosses. But are employees aware of these pay disparities? Are employees demotivated by this inequality? To address these questions, we conducted a field experiment with a sample of 2,060 employees from a multibillion-dollar corporation. We make use of the firm’s administrative records alongside survey data and information-provision experiments. First, we document large misperceptions among the employees about the salaries of their managers and smaller but still significant misperceptions of the salaries of their peers. Second, we show that these perceptions have a significant causal effect on the employees’ own behavior. When they find out that their managers earn more than they thought, employees work harder on average. We provide evidence that these effects are consistent with career-concerns models. In contrast, employees work less hard when they find out that their peers earn more. We conclude by discussing implications for pay inequality and pay transparency.
The public discourse around pay transparency has focused on the direct effect: how workers seek
to rectify newly disclosed pay inequities through renegotiations. The question of how wage-setting,
bargaining, and hiring practices change with higher transparency has received less attention. To
study these outcomes, we combine a dynamic wage-bargaining model with data from online labor
markets for low-skill, temporary jobs. We exploit naturally occurring variation in pay transparency
as well as experimentally-induced variation. Wages are more equal, but lower under transparency.
An increase in transparency raises the hiring rate when workers have sufficient bargaining power.
Employer profits rise with transparency, increasing 27% in a field experiment. A key insight is
that increasing transparency decreases the bargaining power of workers, as employers credibly
refuse to pay high wages to any one worker to avoid costly renegotiations with others. We discuss
implications for the gender wage gap and employers' endogenous transparency choices.
