Much of human knowledge is produced in the world's university departments. There is little scientific evidence, however, about how those hundreds of thousands of departments are best organized and led. This study hand-collects longitudinal data on departmental chairpersons in 58 US universities...

This paper examines the effects of state sector domination on wage inequality in urban China. Using Chinese Household Income Project surveys, we conduct two exercises: with quantile regression analysis, we identify wage gaps across the distribution and over time; and we employ the Machado and...

This paper examines change in wage gaps in urban China by estimating quantile regressions on CHIPS data. It applies the Machado and Mata (2005) decomposition, finding sharp increases in inequality from 1988 to 1995 and from 2002 to 2008 largely due to changes in the wage structure. The analysis...

We empirically deconstruct informal employment in China into private business owners and casual workers without job contracts. Survey data from 2007 and 2013 document a rise in informal employment to the point where it exceeds formal employment, potentially an unintended consequence of the 2008...

Nearly all workers have a supervisor or 'boss'. Yet there is almost no published research by economists into how bosses affect the quality of employees' lives. This study offers some of the first formal evidence. First, it is shown that a boss's technical competence is the single strongest...

Although it has long been conjectured that having physicians in leadership positions is valuable for hospital performance, there is no published empirical work on the hypothesis. This cross-sectional study reports the first evidence. Data are collected on the top-100 U.S. hospitals in 2009, as...

How much knowledge should leaders have of their organization's core business? This is an important question but not one that has been addressed in the management literature. In a new 'theory of expert leadership' (TEL), this paper blends conceptual work with recent empirical evidence. It...

This paper is an attempt to understand the effects of leaders on organizational performance. We argue for an ‘expert leader' model of leadership. We differentiate between four kinds of leaders according to their level of inherent knowledge and industry experience. After controlling for...