A booming literature has argued that mission-based motives are a central feature of mission-oriented labor markets. This paper shifts the focus to task-based motivation and finds that it yields significantly more effort than mission-based motivation. Moreover, in the presence of significant task...

Cyberattacks have risen to become one of the most critical global risks. Despite increasing investments to combat cyberattacks, there remains a significant, often unnoticed vulnerability: employees. Previous literature reveals that over two-thirds of cyberattacks within organizations result from...

Why do individuals' preferences for redistribution often diverge widely from their material self-interest? Using an original online survey experiment spanning eight countries and 12,000 respondents across Latin America, one of the most unequal regions in the world, we find significant evidence...

Governments often pursue procyclical fiscal policies, even though they reduce voter welfare. Is this because voters actually prefer procyclical policies? The analysis in this paper exploits the first individual-level evidence from an original survey of 12,000 respondents in 8 countries across...

We exploit new experimental and quasi-experimental data to investigate voters' intrinsic motivation to engage politically. Does having the right to vote increase engagement or, given significant incentives to free ride, do eligible voters remain rationally unengaged? Does knowledge that one's...

Theory suggests that employee trust is key to productivity in organizations, but empirical evidence documenting links between trust and constraints on performance is scarce. This paper analyzes self-collected data on public sector employees from eighteen Latin American countries and Önds that...

Though governments regularly implement fiscal adjustments to avert crisis, voter attitudes towards competing adjustment strategies are still poorly understood. A conjoint experiment with 8,000 survey respondents in Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Peru confirms that individuals prefer spending-...

This working paper advances research on inequality with unique, new data on income distribution in 61 countries, including 20 Latin American countries, to explore the effects of political parties on redistribution. First, consistent with a central, but still contested, assumption of the...

The challenge of public administration reform is well-known: politicians often have little interest in the efficient implementation of government policy. Using new data from 439 World Bank public sector reform loans in 109 countries, we demonstrate that such reforms are significantly less likely...

Using a large, original database of 385 politically connected firms under the Mubarak regime in Egypt, we document for the first time the negative impact of cronyism on economic growth. In the early 2000s, a policy shift in Egypt led to the expansion of crony activities into new, previously...