Past Speakers

Below is the list of past speakers at PEW.

October 26 (Sat.) 2024

*The workshop will end later than usual since the workshop has two 1.5-hour presentations.

1st Session

This presentation introduces the conceptual development of prosocial motivation, a concept that has garnered significant attention in recent years, and its application to organizational behavior research. Traditionally, studies on prosociality have focused on behaviors such as helping, cooperation, donation, and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), with prosocial motivation considered merely as a factor that drives these actions. However, recent research has shifted toward examining prosocial motivation itself—the desire to benefit others through work—as a key driver of effort in the workplace (e.g., Grant, 2008). This presentation highlights prosocial motivation as a driver of effort and reviews its conceptual development and associated outcomes, particularly following Grant's (2008) work. Recent studies have shown that prosocial motivation positively influences not only employees' well-being but also productivity and creativity in the workplace. However, previous research has primarily focused on its autonomous aspects, with limited attention to its controlled aspects driven by obligation or pressure. Finally, this presentation introduces studies that address these underexplored areas.

2nd Session

We conducted a randomized controlled trial with 212 university students to determine whether the productivity and the quality and quantity of communication improve with increased openness in the layout of a meeting room. The trial involved groups of four participants engaging in a 30-minute discussion task in two settings: a closed room with a curtain (control group, closed condition) and a glass room without a curtain (treatment group, semi-closed condition). We measured the productivity of the discussions by third-party evaluation. We also created proxy variables from the content of the discussions to analyze communication quantity, including the "number of laughs," "number and duration of silences," and "number of characters in statements," as well as communication quality, measured by "emotional polarity" and "number of topics." We used fixed effects models and OLS to estimate the semi-closed condition's effect in 30-minute and five-minute increments. Results showed that the third-party evaluation was at most 4% higher in semi-closed meeting rooms than in closed condition rooms. Furthermore, in semi-closed condition rooms, the number of positive comments and topics increased towards the end of the discussion, but there were no significant differences in laughs, silence, or the number of words in statements.

October 10 (Thu.), 2024

*Joint with the Empirical Microeconomics Workshop at the Waseda Institute of Political Economy. 

1st Session

How does growing pay transparency affect workers’ fairness perceptions and effort? In a field experiment with college students in China hired to do a three-hour data entry job, we informed randomly selected participants that there were others earning more for the same job (treatment condition), keeping the rest uninformed (control condition). Despite perceiving their pay as less fair, the treated participants increased their work effort as compared to those in the control condition. The treatment effects are not moderated by the participants’ fairness concerns. The reasons participants gave for pay differences, elicited after the experiment, are benign, “better workers” being most frequent. A representative survey of working population in China corroborates our experimental findings.  

September 28 (Sat.), 2024

1st Session

This study investigates the heterogeneous effects of minimum wage hikes on the labor supply of married women in Japan, particularly those eligible for the spousal deduction. The Japanese income tax exemption system for spouses has a nonlinear eligibility threshold, which incentivizes low-wage married female workers to limit their annual earnings to 1.05 million yen. When the minimum wage is raised, those workers near the threshold are expected to decrease their labor supply to adjust their annual earnings, while other workers may increase their labor supply or do not respond due to the substitution effect. We utilize an individual-year-month panel data and employ a novel staggered adoption to estimate the effect of binding minimum wages.  We find that minimum wage binding has positive impact on income for workers who have no incentive to limit their earnings but not-clear impact for workers who are incentivized. Furthermore, the income effect seems to dominate over the substitution effect for workers with high earnings. We also document a significant labor supply response at the extensive margin while such adjustments at the intensive margin are less pronounced. These findings are strong evidence that the minimum wage impact on income is highly heterogeneous largely due to the dynamics of labor market entry and exit rather than adjusting hours worked.

September 28 (Sat.), 2024

2nd Session

Non-compete agreements (NCAs) are crucial for startups as they prevent employees from joining competing firms, thus reducing the risk of the hiring firm misappropriating the startup's intellectual property. I propose an additional significant role of NCAs in startups: acting as a defense against acquihiring. By granting a startup monopsony power over its employee, an NCA increases the startup's outside payoff in acquisition bargaining, making it more challenging for an acquirer to finalize the deal. The NCA can improve worker allocation by either preventing inefficient acquihiring or facilitating efficient acquihiring. Moreover, by preventing acquihirng, the NCA promotes labor market competition and improves worker welfare as long as it does not entirely restrict labor mobility. Finally, I will discuss the optimal regulation of NCAs in industries with high acquisition potential.

July 27 (Sat.), 2024

1st Session

Japanese professional boat racing is one of the few sports that allows men and women to compete on an equal footing, though the gender balance is skewed in favor of men. The Japanese Speedboat Racing Association randomly assigns racers into single-sex and mixed-sex races and implemented a policy requiring the minimum weight for male racers to be raised to 52kg from 51kg after November 1, 2020. The randomization and the exogenous policy shock enable us to shed light on affirmative action policy and explore the relationship between competitive intensity and effort. Using over 1.5 million racer-race observations from January 1, 2017, to December 31, 2022, we find that (1) shifting from single-sex to mixed-sex races decreases the effort of all male and only middle- and low-ability female racers; (2) the policy change mitigates the discouragement effect on efforts of middle- and low-ability female racers when shifting from single-sex to mixed-sex races, whereas has no effect on male racers. Overall, our empirical evidence suggests that affirmative action can promote the efforts of female racers on average.

2nd Session

Group identity is known to influence human behavior, but the impact of multiple group identities on  behavior  is  not  well-understood.  In  this  study,  we  investigate  how  group  identity  affects willingness to compete when added to gender identity, which plays a significant role in willingness to compete. Initially, participants’ group identities are induced by the minimal group paradigm. Subsequently,  we create pairs  consisting  of  one  male  and  one  female  and elicit  willingness  to compete  under  the  following  three  conditions:  a  control  condition  where  the  identity  of  the competitive partner's group is not specified, an ingroup condition where the competitive partner belong to the same group, and an outgroup condition where the competitive partner belong to a different  group.  Overall,  the  willingness  to  compete  with  the  outgroup  over  the  ingroup  is observed. Specifically for men, it is found, in comparison to the control group, that they tend to avoid competition with the ingroup women. 

June 22 (Sat.), 2024

1st Session

 Women continue to lag behind pay and promotions compared with their male counterparts, contributing to the gender wage gap. We investigate whether these gender gaps can, to some extent, be explained by gender differences in self-promotion and supervisors' evaluations. We examine the employment records from a large business solutions firm in Japan.  These records contain objective measures of ability (university rank and exam score) and productivity (tasks completed) that are linked to the subjective evaluations that supervisors use to grant promotions.  These subjective evaluations consist of two parts: a self-rating component and a rating by a supervisor. We begin by documenting a large gender gap in self-evaluations as well as supervisor evaluations: conditional on observed productivity, women tend to evaluate themselves lower than their male peers.  Supervisors use these self-evaluations as inputs, and as a result are more likely to provide women lower evaluations than men, conditional on productivity.  The gender gap is more pronounced when they evaluate stereotypically male-typed tasks than female-typed tasks: Women tend to evaluate themselves lower when working on a male-typed task, and women tend to receive lower evaluations from their supervisors conditional on ability when they are on a male-typed task. After supervisors were informed of this discrepancy in self-evaluations, supervisor evaluations of women at the company increased, suggesting that providing knowledge about these gaps can help improve equity.  

2nd Session 

In Japan, the proportion of female managers has consistently remained lower than in other countries, representing a longstanding and unresolved issue. On June 5, 2023, the Japanese government required that companies listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange's Prime Market appoint at least one female director by 2025, and that 40% of directors be female by 2030. This study empirically examines the stock market reactions to this announcement. We first follow the event-study method used in Ahern and Dittmar (2012) and then employ the portfolio-based approach used in Eckbo et al. (2023). We find that the announcement returns are likely to be positive in some cases when using Ahern and Dittmar's (2012) method; however, when using Eckbo et al.'s (2023) method, the announcement returns are insignificant. Our results suggest that investors might believe Japanese firms are likely to have enough qualified female directors without negative effects on firm value. 

April 27 (Sat.), 2024  → May 11 (Sat.), 2024

1st Session

This study examines the impact of the ICT and AI revolutions on the productivity of professional Japanese Chess (Shogi) players, using data from the last 40 years of the Grandmaster League. The ICT revolution, marked by the introduction of game databases, and the AI revolution, characterized by the development of advanced AI engines, significantly influenced professionals across different age groups. We employed two types of performance measures in this study. The first is a relative measure, analyzing annual rankings in the Grandmaster League, and the second is an absolute measure, evaluating a player's move with a Japanese chess AI engine. Our findings indicate that younger players showed improvements in both relative and absolute performance due to these technological advancements. Additionally, older players have demonstrated notable improvements in absolute performance following the AI revolution. These findings highlight the importance of adaptability and continuous learning in response to technological advancements.

2nd Session

It is recently observed that holistic admission has been additionally introduced or expanded in countries where written exam-based admission has traditionally been dominant. This additional introduction might help the university diversify the student body and admit well-qualified students who were overlooked in written exam-based admission. However, since applicants in many cases can choose which types of admissions to take and holistic admission is conducted prior to written exam-based admission, some students admitted through holistic admission would be admitted to the same university through written exam-based admission even without the holistic admission. Furthermore, if the number to be admitted to the university is determined in advance, the university could lose some students due to the introduction of holistic admission because the slot for written exam-based admission is reduced. Hence, affected students, those admitted and those not admitted because of holistic admission, should be compared. This paper exploits administrative data from a middle-ranked university in Japan and examines the effects of holistic admission on admitted student quality and diversity. The university’s admission system, in which applicants to their holistic admission need to decide to apply to their written exam-based admission before knowing the result of the holistic admission, helps me to predict who would have been admitted through the written exam-based admission in the absence of the holistic admission. I supplementarily analyze noncognitive abilities and social economic status using survey data. I found that the holistic admission enabled the university to admit students who would not have been admitted solely through the written exam-based admission. Holistic admissions can be a tool for diversifying the student body at university, including an increase in female students’ enrollment, without deteriorating student quality much. Nonetheless, a substantial portion of students admitted through holistic admission would have been admitted through written exam-based admission without the holistic admission.

March 12, 2024

In this study, first, we consider the multi-task by a single agent with a single principal based on the LEN model. The agent decides the level of actions, and these actions improve the level of outputs. This study assumes that actions affect the other output. In other words, actions have a spillover effect. Additionally, we assume that the case in which one action does not have a spillover effect on the other output in our analytical model. Consequently, we demonstrate, in this case, while its action cannot have an impact on the other output, the level of its action increases as the other action's spillover effect increases from the model analysis. This is because, depending on the economic environment, we can obtain several outcomes and must consider the features of equilibrium outcomes based on comparative statistics. Next, in this report, we investigate the effect of the choice of performance indicators and the correlation among indicators using the laboratory experiment. In the experiment, we assume that we use three performance evaluations (i.e., profit, profit + sales, and sales and cost) and manipulate the correlations among the error terms of cost and sales, and therefore, we employ a 3×2 experiment in this study. Consequently, contrary to the prediction we obtain when participants are evaluated by profit + sales, they allocate less effort on sales than the optimal level. On the other hand, when we employ the indicator as sales + cost, then participants allocate the excessive effort on sales in the experiment than the effort under the profit case. Additionally, the correlation does not play an important role in our experiment. Lastly, we find that the high accounting knowledge accelerates its bias in our experiment.

February 29, 2024

 We quantify the impact of unexpectedly assigned tasks on overtime work in the context of Japanese government officials. Data on overtime work are typically not reliable. We overcome this problem by using mobile phone location data, which enables us to precisely measure the nighttime population in the government office district in Tokyo at an hourly frequency. Exploiting the exogenous nature of task arrivals, we estimate dynamic responses of overtime work. We find that, in response to an unexpected task, overtime work initially decreases and then increases persistently. Institutional changes to relax the time constraint and improve the working environment of government officials play a part in mitigating overtime work, but persistent increases in overtime work remain. We provide a simple model of optimal work allocation and show that distortion in intertemporal task allocation can account for the observed responses. 

January 25, 2024

Job-stress develops when the demands of work exceed the resources that a worker has for managing these demands.  Chronic job-stress reduces work capacity, causing burnout, resulting in a loss of utility for workers and a loss of revenue for firms. We present a model of job-stress and burnout and show how they arise from organisational design and product market conditions. Burnout covers a wide range of negative health outcomes induced by stress such as psychological burnout, depression, heart disease and increased mortality risk. Firms have heterogeneous efficiency and hence differ in the cost of providing job resources. In equilibrium some firms are a great place to work, never causing burnout, some firms are moderate quality workplaces and do cause burnout, while the worst workplaces result in employees quitting before they are burnt out. As competition increases, burnout increases in both extensive and intensive margins: the possibility of burnout arises in more firms, and workers become more likely to experience burnout in each firm.  Autonomy enables workers to manage higher levels of stress, but it also impacts job demands by inducing changes in firms' investment in resources.  Ex post mismatch causes inefficiency by introducing an information asymmetry (only a worker knows if they are mismatched) resulting in under-investment in resources and excessive quitting.

November 28,  2023

Social interactions in the workplace can generate reciprocal peer effects and narrow the psychological distance for team prosociality among coworkers. Incorporating such a psychological interdependence into a team production model, we investigate how the optimal social interactions characterized by the type of task the team is performing (complementary or substitutable tasks) and the vertical and horizontal structure of the team (with or without leadership). We find that in the case of complementary tasks, social interactions can enhance team performance not only for horizontal teams but also for vertical teams led by more prosocial leaders, by narrowing the prosociality gap among members and resolving task bottlenecks. On the other hand, in the cases of horizontal and vertical teams performing substitutable tasks and vertical teams performing complementary tasks supported by a more prosocial follower, social interactions can actually decrease team performance. Our results provide important implications for organizations in considering when, for what type of team, by whom, and to what extent to promote social interaction within teams that bring members' personal (psychological) distances closer, as a means of enhancing organizational effectiveness.

October 31,  2023

This paper empirically examines the relationship between promotion and lateral moves on internal labor markets using Japanese business card data registered in "Eight," the business-oriented social networking service provided by Sansan, Inc. Recent internal labor markets literature has articulated the importance of dynamic job assignments in accumulation of managerial skills (Gibbons and Waldman, 2004; Lazear, 2005, 2012; Frederiksen and Kato, 2018; Jin and Waldman, 2020). The Japanese business card data is well-suited for empirical analysis of internal labor markets as it provides detailed panel information on workers’ careers inside firms, including departmental transitions, changes in job levels, and geographical relocation.

September 28,  2023

http://winpec.sakura.ne.jp/Winpec_Workshop_Calendar/seminars/view/155

July 18,  2023

July 15,  2023

Organizational Economics Conference

June 23, 2023

*We are planning the face-to-face Lunch Meeting with Dr. Zhang after the workshop.

May 30, 2023

This study compares entrepreneurs’ and employees’ tasks and explores the relationship between employees’ opportunities to learn entrepreneurs’ tasks and entrepreneurship. Analysis of comprehensive task information from 31 countries shows that entrepreneurs perform more autonomous and diverse tasks, financial and managerial tasks, and fewer compiling tasks than employees do. Analysis of worker-level data from 23 countries from 2012 to 2017 demonstrates that employees’ greater learning opportunities for entrepreneurs’ tasks increase individuals’ self-perceived entrepreneurial skills and their probability of becoming entrepreneurs. In contrast, having more learning opportunities does not result in a higher level of employment or innovativeness in entrepreneurs’ businesses. This study primarily contributes to the scarce literature on entrepreneurs’ tasks and human resource development in entrepreneurial ecosystems. It also further develops the “jack-of-all-trades” view of entrepreneurship by showing that more opportunities to learn a variety of tasks do not necessarily promote entrepreneurship but the content of diverse tasks matters. 

March 6-7, 2023



7th (Mon) 13:00-14:30 JST

February 9, 2023

January 10, 2023

Joint with Empirical Microeconomics Workshop, WINPEC

December 22, 2022

1st Session

2nd Session

November 10, 2022

August 12, 2022

1st Session

2nd Sesstion

May 13, 2022

April 7, 2022

Joint with Empirical Microeconomics Workshop, WINPEC

March 11, 2022