Episodes
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Reading the feed…
This paper studies the effect of managers for the performance of public hospitals, specifically following a reform in Chile that changed their recruitment process. The main findings are that the reform decreased mortality, likely through the mechanism of improving the quality of managers (e.g., replacing managers without management degrees with managers with management degrees).
This paper studies what happens when a worker has a different set of values than (a) their boss, or (b) their colleagues. Productivity is lower workers with such value dissonance, and the mechanism appears to be worse worker morale and worse communication between worker and manager.
This paper studies whether the racial diversity of medical providers (mostly doctors) in the hospital, affects the health outcomes of minority patients. There is a big effect and, most importantly, it does not only operate through the concordance between individual patient and individual doctor: having more diverse doctors in the hospital generates positive externalities that go beyond the patient-doctor relation.
This paper studies whether human decision-makers can improve on algorithmic recommendations, in the setting of bail decisions in the criminal justice system. Bail judges receive recommendations from predictive algorithms and can choose to confirm or override them. The paper finds that most judges do not add value beyond the algorithm, although a minority do.
This paper studies who benefits and who suffers from working next to their colleagues, in the context of software engineers. Junior engineers benefit from receiving more feedback from their more experienced colleagues, when the team is located in a single building, as opposed to dispersed over many buildings. On the other hand, this comes at the cost of senior engineers writing less programmes. During the pandemic, everybody moved to working from home, so the difference between single-building and multi-building teams disappeared.
Immigrants marry natives at a lower rate than they marry other immigrants (i.e. the intermarriage gap). This paper studies the role of legal status incentives in explaining marriage choices between natives and migrants. When immigrants gain access to legal status, their probability of marrying natives decreases significantly, and existing marriages between immigrants and natives become less stable. The paper shows that legal status considerations explain a substantial portion of immigrants' marriage patterns, as access to legal status reduces the instrumental need to marry a native to obtain r
Women get promoted at a lower rate than men (i.e. the gender promotion gap). This paper studies the role of perceptions of 'potential' in explaining this promotion gap. Managers are asked to evaluate the potential of their subordinates, and women consistently receive lower average 'potential' evaluations than men. The paper shows that accounting for differences in potential explains a large proportion of the gender promotion gap.
This paper studies the quality of decisions taken by judicial teams, specifically comparing all-male, all-female and mixed teams.
This paper studies what happens to the children living in areas in which the government opens large manufacturing plants, over the long term.
This paper documents the fact that women ask for less money in salary negotiations. The main mechanism is that they are less informed about the average salaries that they could be asking for.
This paper studies incentives in science, focusing on the key decision of when to stop a research project. The trade-off is between working for longer in order to improve the quality of the research, versus stopping earlier in order to claim being the first to have made a particular discovery.
This paper evaluates the success of South Korea's industrial policy, implemented in the early seventies and widely credited with sparking the country's industrial development.
This paper proposes a new explanation for the Neolithic Revolution (i.e. the switch from nomadic hunter-gatherers to sedentary farmers). The explanation is based around the notion of risk in calorie consumption. The increase in seasonality at the end of the last ice age increased the attractiveness of food storage and decreased the value of chasing food sources from location to location.
This paper examines the "revolving door" phenomenon in China's judicial system, where former judges transition to become lawyers, and finds that these lawyers secure significantly higher win rates for their clients due to both their legal expertise and personal connections. The study further reveals that while "revolving-door" lawyers can enhance judicial decision-making, their influence also biases outcomes, leading to a non-monotonic impact on overall judicial quality as their numbers increase.
Workers suffering harassment are often reluctant to report it. Laura Boudreau discusses how to leverage economic theory to increase the likelihood that harassment is reported.
Fraud is a severe and persistent problem in the healthcare industry. Paul Eliason discusses how both regulation and litigation can alleviate fraud in the context of ambulances for dialysis services.
Both physicians and nurse practitioners treat patients in the Emergency Department. David Chan discusses work analysing the productivity both across and within these professions.
Ziad Obermeyer exploits the 'donut hole` in Medicare (i.e., the interval in which beneficiaries are moved from co-paying 25% to 100% of the cost of their drugs) to study the effects on patient mortality.
Manasvini Singh argues that when hospitals become more overcrowded, black patients are more likely to die, while white patients are not.
For-profit providers in the hospice industry have been accused of 'gaming` the system by enrolling patients who should not qualify. However, even some fraud may save Medicare spending if hospices are substantially less costly than alternative care. Jetson Leder-Luis evaluates this trade-off and finds that hospices save money for Medicare by offsetting other expensive care.
Ambar La Forgia discusses what happens to the productivity and patient outcomes of fertility clinics that become part of a chain of clinics.
Introducing a six-episode season devoted to the intersection between health and organisational economics.
Dan Gross discusses the labour market effects of a big technology-induced shock to labour demand of U.S. young women in the early 19th century: the substitution of manual telephone switching by mechanical switching.
Ryan Kellogg discusses the rationale for the existence of drilling deadlines in the contract between mineral owners and extracting firms. He then estimates the additional efficiency generated by these contractual instruments.
Emily Nix discusses what happens to perpetrators and victims following violence at work. Perpetrators experience a penalty in earnings and likelihood of employment, but so do victims. Perpetrators against male victims suffer more than perpetrators against female victims. The firms where the violence takes place experience an exodus of female employees, especially if the firms don't have many female managers.
