We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in the staggered entry of new managers into India's 42 public R&D labs between 1994 and 2006 to study how alignment between the CEO and middle-level managers affect research productivity. We show that the introduction of new lab managers aligned with the...

We study migration in the right tail of the talent distribution using a novel dataset of Indian high school students taking the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE), a college entrance exam used for admission to the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT). We find a high incidence of migration...

One of the most rigorous methodologies in the corporate governance literature uses firms' reactions to industry shocks to characterize the quality of governance. This methodology can produce the wrong answer unless one considers the ways firms compete. Because macro-level shocks reverberate...

High ability individuals can be constrained from commensurate employment opportunities due to their geographic location. In the face of physical, informational and social barriers to migration, firms with nation-wide hiring practices can benefit from facilitating the migration of high ability...

Our study is one of the first natural experiments around the role of leaders in the context of firms. Also while most prior natural experiments around leadership in the policy world have exploited the death of the leader, we exploit an alternate exogenous shock – rigid bureaucratic rules that...

Improving performance of state owned entities (SOEs) can have significant economic impact in countries like India, where SOEs comprise around 30% of aggregate industrial sales. Though the literature on SOE reform is focused on privatization, privatization often has its limits. We suggest an...