Results

Journal article

Management Science:

How do chief executive officers make strategy?

We survey 262 chief executive officer (CEO) alumni of Harvard Business School and gather evidence on three aspects of each executive?s strategy practice: how formalized it is, how it is developed, and how it is implement...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy:

Sweeping up gangs: the effects of tough-on-crime policies from a network approach

Globally, gang proliferation is fought primarily through sweeps. This paper uses a difference-in-differences strategy to examine their causal impact on crime for arrested individuals and their peers. Analysis focuses on ...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review:

Monopsony and employer misoptimization explain why wages bunch at round numbers

We show that administrative hourly wage data exhibit considerable bunching at round numbers. We run two experiments randomizing wages around $0.10 and $1.00 to experimentally measure left-digit bias for identical tasks o...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy:

The making of civic virtues: a school-based experiment in three countries

This paper shows that schools can foster the transmission of civic virtues by helping students to develop concrete, democratically chosen, collective projects. We draw on a RCT implemented in 200 middle schools in three ...Read more...

Journal article

Management Science:

Communication within firms: evidence from CEO turnovers

This paper uses novel, firm-level communication measures derived from communications metadata several months before and after a CEO transition for 102 firms to study whether and how this organizational event is reflected...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of the European Economic Association:

Labor unions and the electoral consequences of trade liberalization

We show that the Brazilian trade liberalization in the early 1990s led to a permanent relative decline in the vote share of left-wing presidential candidates in the regions more affected by the tariff cuts. This happened...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists,:

Management practices and climate policy in China

We investigate how management quality moderates the impact of carbon pricing on Chinese firms. Based on interviews with managers and lead engineers at manufacturing firms in Hubei and Beijing, we construct a novel index ...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review:

When tariffs disrupt global supply chains

We study unanticipated tariffs in a setting with firm-to-firm supply relationships. Firms conduct costly searches and negotiate with potential suppliers that pass a reservation level of match productivity. Global supply ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of the European Economic Association :

Formation of college plans: expected returns, preferences and adjustment process

We exploit a large exogenous shock to study the formation, and updating, of educational plans, and to examine how these plans ultimately impact later educational attainment. Using novel, longitudinal, microdata on cohort...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Immigration, female labour supply and local cultural norms

We study the local evolution of female labour supply and cultural norms in West Germany in reaction to the sudden presence of East Germans who migrated to the West after reunification. These migrants grew up with high ra...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Commuting for crime

People care about crime, with the spatial distribution of both actual and perceived crime affecting the amenities from living in different areas and residential decisions. The literature finds that crime tends to happen ...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

How polarised are citizens? Measuring ideology from the ground-up

We investigate whether the ideological polarisation of citizens has increased in Western democracies. We propose a novel methodology to identify individual ideologies by applying Latent Dirichlet Allocation to political ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of the European Economic Association:

Come together: firm boundaries and delegation

We jointly study firm boundaries and the allocation of decision rights within them by confronting an incomplete-contracts model with data on vertical integration and delegation for thousands of firms around the world. In...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review :

The impact of regulation on innovation

We present a framework that can be used to assess the equilibrium impact of regulation on endogenous innovation with heterogeneous firms. We implement this model using French firm-level panel data, where there is a sharp...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Perspectives:

The evolution of work from home

Full days worked at home account for 28 percent of paid workdays among Americans 20?64 years old, as of mid-2023. That's about four times the 2019 rate and ten times the rate in the mid-1990s. We first explain why the bi...Read more...

Journal article

Management Science:

Information spillovers in experience goods competition

Trialing an experience good allows consumers to learn their value for the sampled good and also informs beliefs about their value for similar products. These demand-side information spillovers across products create a re...Read more...

Journal article

AEA Papers and Proceedings:

The local labor market effects of modern manufacturing capital: evidence from France

Using an event study methodology and comprehensive micro data from the French manufacturing sector, we analyze the local labor market effects of investments in modern manufacturing capital, including modern automation te...Read more...

Journal article

Labour Economics:

The gender reveal: the effect of sons on young fathers' criminal behavior and labor market activities

Based on New Zealand's administrative court charges data, we document child gender-specific differences in future criminal behavior of young fathers. The deterrent impact of having a son on the future likelihood of recei...Read more...

Journal article

Management Science:

Building a productive workforce: the role of structured management practices

In an influential study, Bender et al. [Bender S, Bloom N, Card D, Van Reenen J, Wolter S (2018) Management practices, workforce selection, and productivity. J. Labor Econom. 36(S1):S371-S409] document consistent relatio...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of the European Economic Association:

CEO pay and the rise of relative performance contracts: a question of governance?

We exploit the large rise in relative performance awards in the United Kingdom over the last two decades to investigate whether these contracts improve the alignment between CEO pay and firm performance. We first documen...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Communication within firms: evidence from CEO turnovers

This paper uses novel, firm-level measures derived from communications metadata before and after a CEO transition in 102 firms to study if CEO turnover impacts employees' communication flows. We find that CEO turnover le...Read more...

Journal article

Oxford Review of Economic Policy:

Education and management practices

The empirical management literature has found that the education of both managers and the workforce more generally appears to be an important driver of better management practices. This article sets out how such relation...Read more...

Journal article

Health Economics (United Kingdom):

Childhood circumstances and young adulthood outcomes: the role of mothers' financial problems

We here consider the cognitive and noncognitive consequences on young adults of growing up with a mother who reported experiencing major financial problems. We use UK data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and ...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Adjustment costs and factor demand: new evidence from firms' real estate

We study corporate real estate frictions and their effect on firm dynamics and labour demand. We build and simulate a general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms that predicts the response of firms to a productivi...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of the European Economic Association:

Prices, policing and policy: the dynamics of crime booms and busts

In many historical episodes, the extent of criminal activity has displayed booms and busts. One very clear example is the case of metal crime, where in the face of big increases in value driven by world commodity prices,...Read more...

Journal article

Oxford Review of Economic Policy:

Gender diversity in firms

This paper explores the recent efforts by the corporate world and public policy to increase the number of women in leadership positions in the workplace. We review and empirically evaluate the `business case? for gender ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Political Economy:

CEO behavior and firm performance

We measure the behavior of over 1,100 CEOs in six countries (Brazil, France, Germany, India, UK and US) using a new methodology that combines (i) a survey measuring each activity undertaken in a random work-week by the e...Read more...

Journal article

The Review of Economic Studies:

The changing returns to crime: do criminals respond to prices?

To what extent does crime follow the pattern of potential gains to illegal activity? This article presents evidence on how criminals respond to this key incentive by reporting crime-price elasticities estimated from a co...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

The time value of housing: historical evidence on discount rates

Most London housing transactions involve trading long leases of varying lengths. We exploit this to estimate the time value of housing ? the relationship between the price of a property and the term of ownership ? over a...Read more...

Journal article

The Review of Financial Studies:

Managing the family firm: evidence from CEOs at work

We build a comparable and bottom-up measure of CEO labor supply for 1,114 CEOs and investigate whether family and professional CEOs differ along this dimension. Family CEOs work 9% fewer hours relative to professional CE...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Family firms: the problem of second-generation bosses

Although family firms are widely praised as the `backbone of the economy?, their productivity is often hampered by weak management. Research by Daniela Scur and Renata Lemos provides new evidence on the performance of `d...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

All in the family? CEO choice and firm organization

Family firms are the most prevalent firm type in the world, particularly in emerging economies. Dynastic family firms tend to have lower productivity, though what explains their underperformance is still an open question...Read more...

Journal article

Economic Policy:

Who voted for Brexit? A comprehensive district-level analysis

On 23 June 2016, the British electorate voted to leave the European Union (EU). We analyse vote and turnout shares across 380 local authority areas in the United Kingdom. We find that exposure to the EU in terms of immig...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

CEO pay and the rise of relative performance contracts: a question of governance?

Would moving to relative performance contracts improve the alignment between CEO pay and performance? To address this, we exploit the large rise in relative performance awards and the share of equity pay in the UK over ...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Family business: management effort and firm performance

Might familyowned, familyrun firms be a serious obstacle to productivity growth in Europe? Oriana Bandiera, Andrea Prat and Raffaella Sadun have collected time use data on over 1,000 chief executive officers to explore d...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review:

Market size, competition, and the product mix of exporters

We build a theoretical model of multi-product firms that highlights how competition across market destinations affects both a firm's exported product range and product mix. We show how tougher competition in an export ma...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Managing the family firm: evidence from CEOs at work

We present evidence on the labor supply of CEOs, and on whether family and professional CEOs differ on this dimension. We do so through a new survey instrument that allows us to codify CEOs? diaries in a detailed and com...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

CEO Incentive Contracts in China: Why Does City Location Matter?

CEO incentive contracts are commonplace in China but their incidence varies significantly across Chinese cities. We show that city and provincial policy experiments help explain this variance. We examine the role of two ...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

Extreme wage inequality: pay at the very top

We provide new evidence on the growth in pay at the very top of the wage distribution in the UK. Sectoral decompositions show that workers in the financial sector have accounted for the majority of the gains at the top o...Read more...

Journal article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics:

Does management matter? Evidence from India

A long-standing question is whether differences in management practices across firms can explain differences in productivity, especially in developing countries where these spreads appear particularly large. To investiga...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Taxes, Cigarette Consumption, and Smoking Intensity: Reply

This paper shows that smoking intensity, i.e. the amount of nicotine extracted per cigarette smoked, responds to changes in excise taxes and tobacco prices. We exploit data covering the period 1988 to 2006 across many US...Read more...

CEP occasional paper

What do we know about China's CEO's? Evidence from across the whole economy

All that we know about the CEO labour market in China comes from studies of public listed companies and state-owned enterprises (SOEs). This paper is the first to examine the operation of the CEO labour market across all...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The CEO Labour Market in China's Public Listed Companies

Using panel data for all of China?s public listed firms over the period 2001-2010 we examine how firms have recruited and rewarded their executives over a decade of huge growth and turbulence. CEO pay is sensitive to fir...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... UK chief executives: paid for performance?

Does it matter whether you work for a successful company? And if so, does it matter who you are? To answer these questions we construct a unique panel dataset covering the pay of all CEOs, senior managers and a fully rep...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Span of Control and Span of Activity

For both practitioners and researchers, span of control plays an important role in defining and understanding the role of the CEO. In this paper, we combine organizational chart information for a sample of 65 companies w...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

CEO Bonding: Who Posts Performance Bonds and Why?

Despite their theoretical value in tackling principal-agent problems at low cost to firms there is almost no empirical literature on the prevalence and correlates of performance bonds posted by corporate executives. Usin...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

Subjective Performance Evaluation in the Public Sector: Evidence from School Inspections

Performance measurement in the public sector is largely based on objective metrics, which may be subject to gaming behaviour. This paper investigates a novel subjective performance evaluation system where independent ins...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A Simple Theory of Managerial Talent, Pay Contracts and Wage Distribution

This paper develops a simple theory of pay structures and pay levels across heterogeneous agents by bringing together optimal contracts inside the firm and competitive resource allocation in the market. The central idea ...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review:

Panic on the streets of London: police, crime, and the July 2005 terror attacks

In this paper we study the causal impact of police on crime, looking at what happened to crime and police before and after the terror attacks that hit central London in July 2005. The attacks resulted in a large redeploy...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does Management Matter? Evidence from India

A long-standing question in social science is to what extent differences in management cause differences in firm performance. To investigate this we ran a management field experiment on large Indian textile firms. We pro...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Anatomy of a Paradox: Management Practices, Organisational Structure and Energy Efficiency

This paper presents new evidence on managerial and organizational factors that explain firm level energy efficiency and TFP. We interviewed managers of 190 randomly selected manufacturing plants in the UK and matched the...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Can Family-Support Policies Help Explain Differences in Working Hours Across Countries?

It has been suggested in the literature that taxes and subsidies play an important role in explaining the differences in working hours across countries. In this paper I test whether public programmes for family support p...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Panic on the Streets of London: Police, Crime and the July 2005 Terror Attacks

In this paper we study the causal impact of police on crime by looking at what happened to crime before and after the terror attacks that hit central London in July 2005. The attacks resulted in a large redeployment of p...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Panic on the streets of London

The terrorist attacks of 7 July 2005 resulted in a very large redeployment of police officers to central London boroughs. New research by Mirko Draca, Stephen Machin and Robert Witt looks at the impact of this increased ...Read more...