LEOH - Lectures on the Economics of Organizations and Human Resources

LEOH will not take place in 2025

 LEOH 2024

Johannes Keppler Universität Linz  September 4-5, 2024

 Prof. Namrata Kala (MIT)

„How Organizational Economics helps us to understand and foster development and environmental policies“

Namrata Kala (MIT)

Namrata Kala is an Associate Professor in Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Her research interests are in environmental and development economics. Her current research projects include studying how firms and households learn about and adapt to environmental change and regulation, the returns to environmental technologies, and the returns to worker training and incentives.

From fall 2015 to 2017, Namrata was a Prize Fellow in Economics, History, and Politics at Harvard University and a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She received her PhD in environmental economics from the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale. She also holds a BA (Honors) in Economics from Delhi University, and an MA in International and Development Economics from Yale University.

She is the author of numerous articles in leading journals in economics including the American Economic Review, American Economic Review: Insights, Econometrica, the Journal of Political Economy, or the Journal of Develoment Economics.

Title: 

The Role of Organizations in Creating and Solving Development and Environmental Problems

Firm and worker productivity levels remain persistently low in developing countries, while environmental quality is getting worse. A key need for low-income countries to catch up in income is to catch up in productivity, while mitigating the economic harm caused by environmentally intensive activity. Organizations are at the heart of these issues – state capacity and organizational structures in the public sector have the ability to regulate economic activity and environmental harm effectively, while firms face the question how to increase productivity in the presence of factor market and institutional frictions. This course will focus on the role of organizations in creating and solving development and environmental problems.

The lectures are organized around three topics:

1.     Monitoring and Authority in the Public Sector: What are the determinants of the quality of monitoring in the public sector? Which audit mechanisms work effectively? How does the allocation of authority impact decision-making and organizational effectiveness?

2.     Misallocation of People and Technology in Firms: how do organizational barriers impact technology adoption by firms? What factors impact task allocation, promotion, and productivity?

3.     Relational Contracting and Firm Productivity: what types of contracting frictions lead to relational contracting? What are the determinants of success in relational contracting and impacts on firm productivity?

 Previous events:

LEOH 2024,  Linz (Prof. Namrata Kala, MIT)

LEOH 2022, Frankfurt (Prof. Andrea Prat, Columbia)   

LEOH 2019, Berlin (Prof. Tore Ellingsen, Stockholm)   

LEOH 2018, Hamburg (Prof. Antoinette Schoar, MIT)

LEOH 2017, Köln (Prof. Botond Koszegi, CEU Budapest) 

LEOH 2016, München (Prof. Oliver Hart, Harvard University) 

LEOH 2015, Frankfurt (Prof. Robert Gibbons, MIT)