Which managerial skills, traits, and practices matter most for productivity? How does the observability of these features affect how appropriately they are priced into wages? Combining two years of daily, line-level production data from a large Indian garment firm with rich survey data on line...

We measure the behavior of 1,114 CEOs in six countries parsing granular CEO diary data through an unsupervised machine learning algorithm. The algorithm uncovers two distinct behavioral types: “leaders” and “managers”. Leaders focus on multi-function, high-level meetings, while managers...

This paper studies the role of leaders in the social movement against slavery that culminated in the U.S. Civil War. Our analysis is organized around a natural experiment: leaders of the failed German revolution of 1848-49 were expelled to the U.S. and became anti-slavery campaigners who helped...

What are the consequences of electing a female leader for policy and political outcomes? We answer this question in the context of U.S. cities, where women's participation in mayoral elections increased from negligible numbers in 1970 to about one-third of the elections in the 2000's. We use a...

We study the role of firm- and manager-specific heterogeneities in executive compensation. We decompose the variation in executive compensation and find that time invariant firm and especially manager fixed effects explain a majority of the variation in executive pay. We then show that in many...

A theory of leadership is proposed and tested. Leaders are characterized as those who have the ability to choose the right direction more frequently than their peers. The theory implies that leaders tend to be more able, place themselves in visible decision making situations more frequently, and...

Using a survey of 800 CEOs in 22 emerging economies we show that CEOs' management styles and philosophy vary with the control rights and involvement of the owning family and founder: CEOs of firms with greater family involvement have more hierarchical management, and feel more accountable to...

Recent research suggests that much of the cross-firm variation in measured productivity is due to differences in use of advanced management practices. Many of these practices – including monitoring, goal setting, and the use of incentives – are mediated through employee decision-making and...

This paper examines the effect of water-borne lead exposure on infant mortality in American cities over the period 1900-1920. Infants are highly sensitive to lead, and more broadly are a marker for current environmental conditions. The effects of lead on infant mortality are identified by...

Despite the importance placed on supervision in the workplace, little is known about the effects of a boss' leadership quality on labor market outcomes such as employee job retention. Using plausibly exogenous assignment of junior officers to bosses in the U.S. Army, we find positive retention...