Frictions in career trajectories within organizations

我的研究主要集中在经济发展空间中的劳动经济学和组织经济学问题。在我的项目中，我与大型组织合作，研究为什么有些人在劳动力市场上发挥了他们的潜力，而另一些人却没有，找出阻碍这一点的摩擦，并探索如何缓解它们。我在奖学金期间的研究计划是完成并发表三篇工作论文。其中第一个提供了证据，证明了管理人员在公司内部匹配工人和工作方面的关键作用，使用的是一家跨国公司10年来20万名员工的人事记录。利用由团队之间的经理轮岗引起的外生变异，我发现成功的经理通过横向和纵向调动使员工在公司内部重新分配。这给工人的职业发展和生产力带来了巨大而持久的收益。结果表明，管理者的有形之手将工人的特定技能与专门的工作相匹配，从而导致现有工人的生产率提高，这种提高比管理者在公司的时间更长。第二篇论文继续在一个非常不同的背景下研究领导力：缅甸的劳工运动。我们通过与工会联盟合作，在全国最低工资谈判的准备阶段动员服装工人，进行了多次实地实验。首先，我们证明了工会领导人与其他工人的不同之处，在于心理学家和社会学家认为他们具有影响集体结果的能力。其次，我们发现，通过在小组讨论中随机安排领导者，他们有助于协调工人的观点，围绕工会偏好的最低工资水平达成共识。第三，通过进行一个以集体行动问题为特征的动员实验，我们表明领导者也在工人的行动中发挥协调作用。第三篇论文首先指出，各国处于不同的发展水平，妇女的劳动参与率差异很大。我们利用一家跨国公司10万多名员工的五年人事记录，结合该公司在101个国家开展业务的男女劳动力参与率，研究这如何影响员工的性别多样性、性别差距和公司生产率。结构性估计表明，在一个反事实的世界里，劳动力参与没有性别障碍，在相同的就业水平和相同的工资账单下，企业生产率将提高32%。研究结果表明，选择是理解多样性和生产力之间联系的有力视角。我还打算起草并发表关于“跨国公司的工资设定”的工作，作为AEA论文和会议记录出版物，其中我考虑了跨国公司在工资设定中的作用，以及总部战略与当地适应如何影响工资政策，以及工人技能水平如何影响这种“采用与适应”的选择。此外，我将提出三个相关的项目，研究文化多样性在团队中的作用，目的研讨会，以提高工人在工作中的积极性，以及为面临流离失所风险的工人提供志愿服务，帮助他们设想不同的职业道路。我打算与金融研究所的研究人员密切互动，以扩大我的技能，与政策团体建立网络，并就这些想法进行头脑风暴，以及如何将它们推进成完整的学术论文。

My research focuses on questions in labor economics and organizational economics across the economic development space. In my projects, I collaborate with large organizations to study the overarching question of why some people reach their potential in the labor market while others do not, to identify the frictions that prevent this, and explore how to alleviate them.My proposed research agenda over the course of the fellowship is to complete, and submit for publication, three working papers.The first of these provides evidence of the critical role of managers in matching workers to jobs within the firm using the universe of personnel records on 200k employees over ten years of a multinational firm. Leveraging exogenous variation induced by the rotation of managers across teams, I find that successful managers cause workers to reallocate within the firm through lateral and vertical transfers. This leads to large and persistent gains in workers' career progression and productivity. The results imply that the visible hands of managers match workers' specific skills to specialized jobs, leading to an improvement in the productivity of existing workers that outlasts the managers' time at the firm.The second paper continues the study of leadership in a very different context: Myanmar's labor movement. We conduct multiple field experiments by collaborating with a confederation of labor unions as it mobilizes garment workers in the run-up to a national minimum wage negotiation. First, we document that union leaders differ from the other workers along several traits that psychologists and sociologists have associated with the ability to influence collective outcomes. Second, by randomly embedding leaders in group discussions, we find that they help coordinate workers' views to build consensus around the unions' preferred minimum wage levels. Third, by conducting a mobilization experiment that features collective action problems, we show that leaders play a coordinating role also for workers' actions.The third paper starts with the fact that women's labor force participation varies widely across countries at every level of development. We ask how this affects gender diversity among employees, gender gaps, and firm productivity using five years of personnel records on over 100K employees of a multinational firm combined with the female to male labor force participation rate in the 101 countries where the firm operates. Structural estimates show that in a counterfactual world with no gender-specific barriers to labor force participation, firm productivity would be 32% higher for the same level of employment and the same wage bill. The findings suggest that selection is a powerful lens to understand the link between diversity and productivity.I also aim to prepare draft and publish the work on "Wage Setting in a Multinational Firm" as an AEA Papers & Proceedings publication, where I consider the role of multinationals in wage setting and how the wage policy is shaped by headquarter's strategy versus local adaptation, and how the worker skill level matters for this choice of "adopt versus adapt".In addition I will take forward three related projects that look at the role of cultural diversity in teams, of purpose workshops to improve worker motivation on the job and of volunteering initiatives for workers at risk of displacement to help them envision different career paths. I intend to closely interact with researchers at the IFS to expand my skill set, build networks also with the policy communities and brainstorm on these ideas and how to push them forward into complete academic papers.