We conduct a field experiment in a large corporation to investigate the effects of supportive leadership behaviors on employee satisfaction, engagement, and performance. Treated leaders receive a brief training promoting leadership behaviors that encourage, assure, and value employee efforts. Our experimental design allows us to observe leaders and employees in a subsequent meeting. We find that the leadership training affects the leaders' supportive behaviors and thereby increases employees' self-reported satisfaction and engagement during the meeting by 0.28 and 0.18 standard deviations, respectively. The effect on team performance is 0.13 standard deviations but is not significant.

AEA RCT Registry May 7. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.7129-1.1

We investigate the fairness views of impartial spectators towards workers who act or communicate competitively but are unsuccessful in a winner-take-all real-effort task. In an online experiment with over 5,800 participants, spectators show significantly less concern toward unsuccessful workers who voluntarily entered a competition for pay, behaved selfishly, or communicated in a dominant tone. There are two main drivers behind the spectators’ changes in financial redistributions towards low earners: firstly, spectators hold workers more accountable when they behave competitively, and secondly, spectators dislike if a worker communicates in a dominant style. We further find that unsuccessful male workers are treated harsher than female workers when workers’ displayed competitiveness is low. However, this gender gap is diminished when workers acted competitively, and both genders are shown equally low concern. 

AEA RCT Registry: https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.6845-1.2000000000000002. 

Sustainable investments are characterized by considerations about financial returns as well as environmental impact. We investigate how information on both aspects alone and in combination impacts the decision to invest sustainably. Moreover, we test whether letting investors express their sustainability preferences in a more detailed way affects their investment decisions. We run an incentivized online experiment with experienced retail investors and a representative sample of the Austrian population (N = 2,254 in total). We find that information on financial returns and information on environmental impact both stimulate sustainable investments. However, presenting the two types of information in combination yields no greater effect than presenting one of them alone. Furthermore, we find no evidence that investment decisions are affected by whether sustainability preferences are elicited generally or in a more detailed format. Results also show that sustainable investments are positively correlated with investors’ biospheric values and their financial literacy. 

OSF registrations: https://osf.io/pe4g2  and https://osf.io/3zymq  

This paper presents a novel technique to measure motivation for working on a task using deviations from the money-maximising benchmark in a real-effort experiment. Although we find that average output increases in response to team incentives and observation, we also nd that workers with high intrinsic motivation do not respond to team incentives. The reason is that highly motivated workers already work hard, and team incentives are not strong enough to overcome the high cost of additional effort.

While differences in confidence have been identified as a driver behind gender gaps in the labor market, less is known about the moderators of these differences. This paper uses a laboratory experiment to investigate how the image concerns related to the self-assessment affect male and female confidence. Subjects assess their relative performance prior to a real-effort task and can subsequently adjust their efforts. I find that women increase their self-assessment when it is made public, but only if the actual placement remains private. There are no effects for men. I also investigate whether subjects who ex ante overstate their ability provide more effort. I find no evidence of such a motivational effect. 

We examine individual-level determinants of interest in STEM and analyze whether a digital web application for elementary-school children can increase children's interest in STEM with a specific focus on narrowing the gender gap. Coupling a randomized-controlled trial with experimental lab and survey data, we analyze the effect of the digital intervention and shed light on the mechanisms. We confirm the hypothesis that girls demonstrate a lower overall interest in STEM than boys. Moreover, girls are less competitive and exhibit less pronounced math confidence than boys at the baseline. Our treatment increases girls' interest in STEM and decreases the gender gap via an increase in STEM confidence. Our findings suggest that an easy-to-implement digital intervention has the potential to foster gender equality for young children and can potentially contribute to a reduction of gender inequalities in the labor market such as occupational sorting and the gender wage gap later in life. 

AEA RCT Registry: https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.5014-1.0.

This guide provides a comprehensive overview of the distinct characteristics of school experiments conducted with children in preschools and schools. We investigate and describe the essential considerations involved in designing and implementing such experiments, drawing insights from a survey conducted with senior researchers. Moreover, the guide summarizes nine key lessons learned from the experiences of these researchers. The paper also presents the opinions of inexperienced researchers in school experiments (juniors) on crucial aspects for successful school experiments, which differ from the opinions of the experienced senior researchers. As a result, this guide serves as a valuable resource for junior researchers embarking on their initial school experiments. By promoting the adoption of best practices endorsed by senior researchers, it strengthens the validity and reliability of school experiments.

This study examines gender differences in leadership behavior and effectiveness using a framed field experiment conducted in a large company. Leaders and followers in randomly assigned teams interacted in recorded online team meetings to discuss topics of strategic importance. Their behaviors were assessed through research assistant ratings and natural language processing, and effectiveness via external evaluations and follower surveys. We find that female leaders exhibited significantly more communal behaviors through elaboration on team members’ ideas, frequent discussion contributions, and affirmative language than male leaders. However, these differences did not translate into superior team performance; male and female leaders showed comparable effectiveness, particularly in external evaluations. Follower evaluations were more responsive to leader gender, with evidence of a “communality bonus” whereby male leaders received disproportionately positive evaluations for communal behaviors. Higher-level leaders achieved better team performance, regardless of gender. These findings suggest that leadership effectiveness is more strongly associated with developed expertise than with gender per se. Organizations may thus benefit from broadly developing leadership capabilities, alongside implementing evaluation systems that mitigate gender biases.

We design a novel real-effort experiment to investigate gender differences and stereotypes in the motivation to work hard (i.e., perseverance) and the relevance of these factors in an experimental employment setting. We find that women persevere more than men and that subjects anticipate this difference. Employer incentives are devised in a way that rewards selecting the candidate who perseveres more. While the expected return to choosing the female candidate over the male candidate is higher in our experiment, employers are not more likely to hire the female candidate. Thus, even in a setting where female employees have a justifiable advantage in employment decisions, which is also anticipated, employers do not hire women more often than men. This finding contrasts with studies showing that men do benefit from positive stereotypes associated with them.