About

Michael Powell is a Professor of Strategy at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. He received his PhD in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2011. Prior to his current position, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow of Applied Economics at the Sloan School of Management at MIT. His research interests include organizational economics, personnel economics, and industrial organization. His work has been published in several prominent economic journals, and he serves as an associate editor at the RAND Journal of Economics. His academic positions include Assistant Professor of Management and Strategy at Kellogg, where he has been since 2013, and he was previously a Donald P. Jacobs Scholar and Assistant Professor of Management & Strategy at the same institution. His educational background includes a Master's degree in Economics from UCLA, where he was a UCLA Departmental Scholar, and a Bachelor's degree in Economics from UCLA. His courses include the economics of organizations, strategy and organization, and research in economics, focusing on topics such as incentives in organizations, firm boundaries, organizational design, and the relationship between organizational structure and strategy.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Business
• Economics
• Demographic economics
• Macroeconomics
• Finance
• Family medicine
• Social psychology
• Economic growth
• Pharmacology
• Mathematical economics
• Medicine
• Psychology
• Law
• Labour economics
• Microeconomics

Selected publications

• Integration, not Concatenation (InC): Hacking educational materials to facilitate efficient, effective, and evaluable new coverage

  2024-11-09

  preprintOpen access

  A four-phase Hackathon of Educational Materials was developed to help instructors integrate, rather than concatenate, new content into existing courses. The “integrate, not concatenate” (InC) approach was piloted with ethical reasoning content in mathematics, statistics, operations research, and data science programs. The InC Hackathon phases were: Hack 1 (H1): Select feasible published ethical reasoning learning outcomes; Hack 2 (H2): Revise course learning outcomes to include ethics and assess the syllabus’s emphasis on ethical practice; Hack 3 (H3): Identify where new outcomes align within the course; Hack 4 (H4): Design assignments to assess these outcomes.The Hackathon took place over eight hours across three days. Originally planned for 4-5 instructors and one course, it engaged 14 instructors, integrating ethical reasoning into seven courses across three programs. Sequenced learning objectives were developed to progressively build students' ethical reasoning. While Hacks 1-3 were completed, Hack 4 required more time, and participants recommended leadership orientation and curriculum-wide alignment for future iterations.This pilot demonstrated a reproducible framework for systemic and systematic curriculum changes in higher education, effectively embedding ethical reasoning content while fostering faculty collaboration and innovation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Organizing Modular Production

  Journal of Political Economy · 2024-10-17 · 3 citations

  article

  Products are increasingly made by assembling separately produced modules. Motivated by the notion that a firm’s production function drives its organization, we explore how modular production shapes a firm’s communication structure. Decisions are partitioned into modules and require closer coordination within modules than across. Each agent knows the state his decision must be adapted to. The principal decides whom each agent tells about his state, given that each communication link comes at a cost. We show that optimal communication networks follow a simple threshold rule and exhibit the threshold property. We discuss comparative statics, applications, and empirical implications.

  PublisherDOI

• Career Spillovers in Internal Labor Markets

  2022-08-05

  datasetOpen accessSenior author

  The package contains all the code necessary to reproduce the figures and tables in Bianchi, Bovini, Li, Paradisi, and Powell (forthcoming). "Career Spillovers in Internal Labor Markets." Review of Economic Studies. Instructions are also given about accessing the raw data.

  PublisherDOI

• Security Segmentation in a Small Manufacturing Environment

  2022-10-05

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Manufacturers are increasingly targeted in cyber-attacks. Small manufacturers are particularly vulnerable due to limitations in staff and resources to operate facilities and manage cybersecurity. Security segmentation is a cost-effective and efficient security design approach for protecting cyber assets by grouping them based on both their communication and security requirements. This paper outlines a six-step approach that manufacturers can follow to implement security segmentation and mitigate cyber vulnerabilities in their manufacturing environments. The security architecture resulting from the security segmentation design activities is a foundational preparation step for additional security strategies like Zero Trust.

  PublisherDOI

• Career Spillovers in Internal Labor Markets

  2022-09-06

  datasetOpen accessSenior author

  The package contains all the code necessary to reproduce the figures and tables in Bianchi, Bovini, Li, Paradisi, and Powell (forthcoming). "Career Spillovers in Internal Labor Markets." Review of Economic Studies. Instructions are also given about accessing the raw data.

  PublisherDOI

• Career Spillovers in Internal Labor Markets

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2022-09-06

  datasetOpen accessSenior author

  The package contains all the code necessary to reproduce the figures and tables in Bianchi, Bovini, Li, Paradisi, and Powell (forthcoming). "Career Spillovers in Internal Labor Markets." Review of Economic Studies. Instructions are also given about accessing the raw data.

  PublisherDOI

• Career Spillovers in Internal Labor Markets

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2022-07-18

  datasetOpen accessSenior author

  The package contains all the code necessary to reproduce the figures and tables in Bianchi, Bovini, Li, Paradisi, and Powell (forthcoming). "Career Spillovers in Internal Labor Markets." Review of Economic Studies. Instructions are also given about accessing the raw data.

  PublisherDOI

• Career Spillovers in Internal Labour Markets

  The Review of Economic Studies · 2022 · 28 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Labour economics
  • Economics

  Abstract This article studies career spillovers across workers, which arise in firms with limited promotion opportunities. We exploit a 2011 Italian pension reform that unexpectedly tightened eligibility criteria for the public pension, leading to sudden, substantial, and heterogeneous retirement delays. Using administrative data on Italian private-sector workers, the analysis leverages cross-firm variation to isolate the effect of retirement delays among soon-to-retire workers on the wage growth and promotions of their colleagues. We find evidence of spillover patterns consistent with older workers blocking the careers of their younger colleagues, but only in firms with limited promotion opportunities.

  PublisherDOI

• Behavioral constraints on the design of subgame-perfect implementation mechanisms

  Zurich Open Repository and Archive (University of Zurich) · 2021-04-01

  preprintOpen access

  We study subgame-perfect implementation (SPI) mechanisms that have been proposed as a solution to incomplete contracting problems. We show that these mechanisms, which are based on off-equilibrium arbitration clauses that impose large fines for lying and the inappropriate use of arbitration, have severe behavioral constraints because the fines induce retaliation against legitimate uses of arbitration. Incorporating reciprocity preferences into the theory explains the observed behavioral patterns and helps us develop a new mechanism that is more robust and achieves high rates of truth-telling and efficiency. Our results highlight the importance of tailoring implementation mechanisms to the underlying behavioral environment. (JEL C92, D44, D82, D86, D91)

  OA PDFDOI

• Common Agent or Double Agent? Pharmacy Benefit Managers in the Prescription Drug Market

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2021-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• James B. Rebitzer

  Boston University

  16 shared

• Brigham Frandsen

  Brigham Young University

  13 shared

• Richard Holden

  10 shared

• Rena M. Conti

  Boston University

  10 shared

• David Brock

  9 shared

• Nicola Bianchi

  8 shared

• C. R. Hinings

  8 shared

• Matteo Paradisi

  Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance

  7 shared

Awards & honors

• National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (20…
• MIT Presidential Fellowship (2006-2008)
• UCLA Departmental Scholar in Economics (2004-2006)