Research

My Research Statement can be accessed here.

The Plight of the Middle Manager (with Tim Salmon, Job Market Paper) 

In the wake of the “Great Resignation”, there has been increased attention paid to the “toxic work environments” as workers have pointed it as the reason they have quit their jobs. Middle managers are blamed for creating such work environments, but their own situation is also problematic. They face pressure from upper management to extract high effort from their workers, while given few options to incentivize that effort. We conduct an experiment using a modified gift-exchange game to investigate the middle managers’ behavior and its effect on the formation of toxic work environments. Middle managers can provide positive or negative feedback to workers as their main means of encouraging effort, and face varying levels of pressure from upper management for eliciting effort from the worker. We also investigate whether a reward bonus with a small amount of monetary incentive may help diminish negativity in the workplace. Our findings support the notion that indeed much of the “toxicity” in many work environments could stem from the problematic nature of many middle management roles and even a small increase in the ability of the middle managers to reward employees could help out.

Individuals’ Avoidance to Judgment

Data show that women and minorities are underrepresented in many fields such as literature authors, economic studies and legal services, but have better representation in fields like finance and accounting. One significant difference between these two groups of occupations is that people’s work can be evaluated more subjectively or objectively. There are many possible reasons for this differential representation but one under-investigated possibility has to do with preferences for avoiding subjective valuation. Woman and minorities who are perhaps expecting differential treatment compared to others may well seek to avoid situations in which their evaluation would be primarily subjective as it is in these cases where gender and ethnic discrimination can most easily arise. We experimentally examine a situation in which subjects can opt for subjective versus objective evaluation to measure the preference people might have for avoiding subjective evaluation. Our current data suggests that women and minorities are less likely to get involved into tasks with subjective judgment, and the approach of keeping their identities anonymous during the process cannot help as it decreases the avoidance among all the people.