The positive role of transformational leadership on productivity and mental wellbeing has long been established. Transformational leadership behavior may be particularly suited to navigate times of crisis which are characterized by high levels of complexity and uncertainty. We exploit...

Based on survey responses from more than 1,700 managers in Germany, this study elicits employers’ perceptions of working from home during COVID-19 and their long-term expectations for the time after the pandemic. Based on employers’ forecasts of the share of employees working from home...

The recent shift towards working from home (WFH) has far-reaching implications for social and economic outcomes. While firms are gatekeepers for the ongoing diffusion of flexible work arrangements, there is little evidence on how firms decide to offer WFH. We leverage two survey experiments...

This paper studies a principal-agent relation in which the principal's private information about the agent's effort choice is more accurate than a noisy public performance measure. For some contingencies the optimal contract has to specify ex post inefficiencies in the form of inefficient...

This paper shows the strategic aspects of international outsourcing in an oligopolistic market, if outsourcing is attractive because of fixed cost savings. We show that outsourcing decisions are strategic substitutes. Furthermore, we demonstrate that due to decreasing individual output,...

We study management practices and performance in a representative sample of German municipalities, which provide the bulk of direct administrative services for citizens and firms in Germany. Surveyed municipalities differ substantially in their use of structured management practices, and this...

Wie kann Vereinbarkeit von Beruf und Familie gelingen – und zwar sowohl bei Frau-en als auch bei Männern? Ziel des Forschungsprojektes "Betriebliche Gelingensbedin-gungen einer partnerschaftlichen Aufteilung von Erwerbs- und Familienarbeit" war es herauszufinden, unter welchen Bedingungen...

In this paper, we study whether performance feedback can serve as an instrument for firms to increase employee retention. Feedback on the relative performance may affect individual job search behavior differently depending on workers' relative rank among their peers. In line with these...

We analyze how the team formation process influences the ability composition and performance of teams, showing how self-selection and random assignment affect team performance for different tasks in two natural field experiments. We identify the collaboration intensity of the task as the key...

We present a simple model to illustrate how birthplace diversity may affect team performance. The model assumes that birthplace diversity increases the stock of available knowledge due to skill complementarities and decreases effciency due to communication barriers. The consequence of these two...