Below is a list of my current working papers and publications. Feel free to contact with any questions.
Gender and Competitiveness When Earning for Others: Experimental Evidence and Implications for Sponsorship (With Nathan Barrymore and Cristian Dezső, equal contribution-listed alphabetically) (2022, Strategic Management Journal).
This paper investigates the willingness of managers to sponsor subordinates based upon gender. We rely upon observations from behavioral economics and insights from organizational research regarding homophiliy and discrimination to theorize about sponsorship behavior of managers. In a controlled experimental setting using online workers, we test how the preferences for competition of participants assigned the role of manager change based on whether rewards accrue to themselves or to their protégés, as well as their own and their protégés gender. We find that when earnings accrue to their protégés, female managers are more competitive than when competing for themselves, and in fact, no different than their male counterparts. However, when earnings accrue to their protégés, male managers discriminate, competing at a significantly higher rate when their protégé is male rather than female. Finally, we find that male managers’ preference to sponsor male protégés disappears when male managers receive information about protégés’ risk preferences, whereas information about protégés’ performance has no effect. Our research, thus, provides novel insights not only in various strands of academic literature, but also into increasing the effectiveness of sponsorship.
Reconciling Conflicting Evidence on Why Employees from Small Firms Are More Likely to Become Entrepreneurs (with Martin Ganco, Evan Starr), (first round, R&R )
Extant literature has found evidence of the small firm effect, that workers from smaller firms are more likely to enter entrepreneurship. Different theories emphasize various interpretations as to the mechanisms that explain this effect, such as the self-selection of entrepreneurial individuals into smaller firms, or larger firms soaking up the best ideas internally. A shortcoming of the various theories is scant evidence on the mechanisms and limited exploration of the small firm effect to other contexts outside of science, mutual funds, and high-tech industries. This paper tests competing theories with better data on underlying mechanisms via a broad sample of workers across all industries. We find evidence of the small firm effect within all industries and more support of theories involving self-selection and human capital development as the primary mechanism driving this effect.
Disagreements, Idea Hiding or Lack of Complementarities? Examining how Ideas Turn into Entrepreneurial Spinouts (with Martin Ganco, Evan Starr) (Prepping for submission)
A disproportionate number of successful entrants across many industries are composed of former employees of existing firms operating in the same industry. Despite the wealth of theoretical perspectives (strategic disagreements, agency costs, market frictions), we have a very limited understanding of how the different theoretical explanations map to empirical patterns, in particular due to a lack of granular data. With a novel survey instrument, we propose to put several of the existing explanations of spinouts to a test. How often and when do employees withhold ideas from their employer? When are employees more likely to share ideas with their employer? What proportion of spinout events do the existing theories explain? What other mechanisms drive spinouts?
Postemployment Restrictive Covenants, Idea Generation and Entrepreneurship (with Evan Starr) (Prepping for submission)
A growing body of scholarship in strategic human capital examines the impact of postemployment impediments to employee entrepreneurship on a variety of outcomes related to individual and firm performance. Postemployment restrictive covenants (PERCs) impose costs to starting a business yet employees who sign are more likely to have access to valuable information and resources. We propose to explore this tension while focusing on several relevant questions that remained less explored: Are employees who are bound by small or larger bundles of PERCs more likely to come up with new entrepreneurial ideas? Despite having more ideas, are they less likely to start new businesses. We build a theoretical framework around the employees’ costs and benefits of starting a business while having greater access to valuable information.
Prosocial Incentives Change Willingness to Compete in Work Tasks: The Role of Gender and Performance (Under Review). Download paper.
This paper uses two experiments to understand the effects of prosocial incentives (where charities benefit from an individual’s efforts) on workers’ willingness to compete in a work task. Counter to expectations and prior literature, prosocial incentives reduce a worker’s willingness to compete by 28%. This result is largely driven by women across all levels of performance opting out of competition; subjective evidence suggests that women fear taking a risk and gaining zero for charity. A second experiment finds support for this mechanism—with lower payout variance and increased expected returns to competition, top performing women become as likely as men to enter competition in work tasks with prosocial incentives. Additionally, men are observed to make more optimal choices in prosocial incentive schemes via higher performing men competing more and lower performers competing less. I discuss how these insights from an experimental setting could inform the design of incentives in the field
Winner Take All or Play it Safe? Effect of Loss Aversion and Prosocial Incentives on Choice of Incentive Structure (Preparing for submission). Download paper.
I investigate the interaction effects of prosocial incentives and loss aversion on the incentive structure selection within the context of a real-effort experiment. When individuals are assigned to the gain domain, they are less likely to select the riskier winner-take-all incentive structure for a prosocial cause versus for themselves. When individuals are given a resource endowment up front and real losses are incurred, I find the opposite effect, participants are more likely to select the tournament incentive for a prosocial cause than for themselves. These findings add to extant behavioral and organizational perspectives on incentive structures and individual motivations.
Intrafirm Market for Ideas: Signals of Quality for Employee Entrepreneurs. (Writing).
What are the effects of covenants not to compete upon employees' willingness to share entrepreneurial ideas with their employers? What are the effects of such contracts upon the willingness of management to listen or the likelihood of employees abandoning such ideas?