On-going Research

Research projects

1. Mitigating Diversity Barriers in Growth Potential and Promotability of employees w/ Valentina Tartari and Orsola Garofalo(on-going).  The project has obtained an Infrastructure Grant to run the experiments (PI, V. Tartari) and a personal Internationalization Grant from the Carlsberg Foundation, as well as a project/postdoc grant from the SparNord Foundation (PI, Orsola Garofalo, named postdoc:, S. Cairo)

To maximize their available pool of talent, companies today aspire to hire, retain and promote the most competent workers based on skills, performance and growth potential, regardless of personal characteristics, such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity, disabilities and age. However, holding experience and skills fixed, studies find that minorities face systematic discrimination during recruitment and promotion processes. One problem may be that while past performance is observable, the future performance of prospective candidates cannot be observed directly. As a consequence, managers’ ratings of growth potential are inherently more subjective, and may be subject to implicit bias. This motivates our research question: Does perceived growth potential drive gender gaps in promotion, and can perceived potential be debiased without harming firm performance? To answer this question, we propose to conduct a lab experiment on a field sample of employees and managers from large Danish firms. The experiment provides an ideal stylized setting for studying how managers’ forecasts of growth potential impact their decision to promote certain workers, when future performance is uncertain. Specifically, we test the hypothesis that gender gaps in promotions reflect biased assessments of individual growth potential. Moreover, the experimental setting allows us to test multiple strategies to mitigate bias taking into account both their effect on gender gaps in promotion and on related firm costs. This allows us to derive policy-advice to firms aspiring to the diversity agenda.

2. Can't you take a rejection? Gender differences in perseverance for funding (w/ John List, Andrew Simon, Luigi Butera, Anne Sophie Lassen and Faith Fatchen) 

Perseverance is important for success in the fields of innovation and science as these fields are characterized by numerous rejections, and only rare wins. Set-backs can discourage participants from staying in “the game”. Meanwhile, being persistent, e.g., trying again after failure, is positively associated with long-term achievement of goals. The competition for science funding is no exception. With some public funding schemes providing funding to fewer than 10% of applicants, an increasing number of researchers will experience a funding rejection. Understanding what stimulates both women’s and men’s persistence in applying for science funding can be seen as an important goal of science policy makers, especially as differences in funding levels between male and female scientists have been reported in several studies. Based on a field-experiment with Novo Nordisk foundation, we, therefore, investigate the effect of feedback after funding rejections on subsequent choices, in terms of re-application and career trajectories, of early career researchers in academia. Specifically, we ask: Can feedback provided in rejection letters to funding applicants enhance persistence in science funding applications? And does reapplication behavior respond differentially to feedback across gender and applicant quality? 

3. Health shocks and direction of innovation (w/ Myers, Koning, and Kongsted) I obtained a personal Internationalization Grant from the Carlsberg Foundation to work on the project.

Existing research on the direction of science focuses primarily on demand-driven innovation. However, a recent strand of work investigates how exposure to certain peer groups in school or one's own socio-demographic background affect scientists' and inventors' direction of invention. We investigate whether exposure to family health shocks in the formative years is associated with an increase in the probability of becoming an inventor/scientist and the probability of conducting research in the specific field of the health shock. We rely on Danish registers amd PubMed. Aggregate data on diffusion of diseases, medicine sales and consumption allow us to decompose innovation into supply (cf. shock to preferences) and demand driven innovation. %An important aspect is to understand the innovation trade off from changing the direction of innovation of a given scientist, i.e. whether a preference-shock is likely to generate break-through innovation, and at what cost, measured as foregone invention.

4. Field differences in Academic Engagement (w/ Cannito,  Kongsted, Tartari)

We use survey evidence on academic engagement to describe field differences in scientific engagement, including informal and formal engagement, as well as commercialization and entrepreneurial activity. We find that academics in both the social sciences and in the arts and humanities are highly active in engagement activities, though they typically engage with public and third-sector partners rather than industry. Interestingly, gender gaps typical of engagement in the STEM fields are not present for the social sciences and the arts and humanities.

5.  The small death of Motherhood and knowledge diffusion (w/ Fabiana Visentin and Valentina Tartari)