About

I study the determinants of workplace productivity, working at the intersection of labor economics, personnel & organizational economics, and behavioral economics. I am particularly interested in questions related to hiring, both in terms of firm performance and in terms of consequences for workers and society.

Selected publications

• Code for: Information Frictions and Employee Sorting Between Startups

  ICPSR Data Holdings · 2026-01-01

  datasetOpen access

  Would workers apply to better firms if they were more informed about firm quality? Collaborating with 26 science-based startups, we create a custom job board and invite business school alumni to apply. The job board randomizes across applicants to show coarse expert ratings of all startups' science and/or business model quality. Making ratings visible strongly reallocates applications toward higher-rated firms. This reallocation holds restricting to high-quality workers. Treatments operate in part by shifting worker beliefs about firms' right-tail outcomes. Despite these benefits, workers make post-treatment bets indicating highly overoptimistic beliefs about startup success, suggesting a problem of broader informational deficits. This is the code accompanying the article.<br>

  PublisherDOI

• Code for: Information Frictions and Employee Sorting Between Startups

  ICPSR Data Holdings · 2026-01-01

  datasetOpen access

  Would workers apply to better firms if they were more informed about firm quality? Collaborating with 26 science-based startups, we create a custom job board and invite business school alumni to apply. The job board randomizes across applicants to show coarse expert ratings of all startups' science and/or business model quality. Making ratings visible strongly reallocates applications toward higher-rated firms. This reallocation holds restricting to high-quality workers. Treatments operate in part by shifting worker beliefs about firms' right-tail outcomes. Despite these benefits, workers make post-treatment bets indicating highly overoptimistic beliefs about startup success, suggesting a problem of broader informational deficits. This is the code accompanying the article.<br>

  PublisherDOI

• Is This Really Kneaded? Identifying and Eliminating Potentially Harmful Forms of Workplace Control

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-08-01 · 1 citations

  reportOpen access

  In a large German bakery chain, many workers report negative perceptions of monitoring via checklists.We survey workers and managers about the value and time costs to all in-store checklists, leading the firm to randomly remove two of the most perceivedly time-consuming and low-value checklists in half of stores.Sales increase and store manager attrition substantially decreases, and this occurs without a rise in measurable workplace problems.Before random assignment, regional managers predict whether the treatment would be effective for each store they oversee.Ex post, beneficial effects of checklist removal are fully concentrated in stores where regional managers predict the treatment will be effective, reflecting substantial heterogeneity in returns that is well-understood by these upper managers.Effects of checklist removal do not appear to come from workers having more time for production, but rather coincide with improvements in employee trust and commitment.Following the RCT, the firm implemented firmwide reductions in monitoring, eliminating a checklist regarded as demeaning, but keeping a checklist that helps coordinate production.

  PublisherDOI

• Demand for Automated Wage Adjustment

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2025-11-24

  dataset1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Direct and Indirect Effects of Employee Performance Improvement Plans

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2025-09-10

  dataset
  PublisherDOI

• Demand for Automated Wage Adjustment

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2025-11-24

  dataset1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Is this Really Kneaded? Identifying and Eliminating Potentially Harmful Forms of Workplace Control

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• The Direct and Indirect Effects of Employee Performance Improvement Plans

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2025-09-10

  dataset
  PublisherDOI

• People, Practices, and Productivity: A Review of New Advances in Personnel Economics

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-08-01 · 8 citations

  reviewOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter surveys recent advances in personnel economics.We begin by presenting evidence showing substantial and persistent productivity variation among workers in the same roles.We discuss new research on incentives and compensation; hiring practices; the influence of managers and peers; and time use, technology, and training.We emphasize two main themes.First, we seek to illustrate the interplay between these topics and productivity differences between people and work units.Second, we argue that personnel economics has benefited from exploration, which we think of as the willingness to use new data and methods to shed light on existing questions and to raise new ones.As many personnel studies use data from individual firms, we discuss external validity and provide concrete guidance on how to improve discussions of the generalizability of findings from specific contexts.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• People, Practices, and Productivity: A Review of New Advances in Personnel Economics

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 14 citations

  reviewOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI