Browsing by Author "Chatterji, Aaron K"
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Item Open Access Empirical Essays on Gender in Organizations(2021) Lluent, Tatiana MichelleThis dissertation consists of three empirical essays on gender and organizations. It contributes to our understanding of the mechanisms that produce and reproduce gender inequality within organizations. The essays of this dissertation address causes of organizational gender inequality at the interpersonal and institutional levels. They do so drawing on rich datasets; one matching restricted-access administrative data on firms and their employees to data on acquisition deals, and a second one built during a year-long field study conducted at the headquarters of a multinational firm. In the first essay, I investigate the role of national culture on organizational inequality in the context of foreign acquisitions in France. I find that gender egalitarianism measured at the country level influences firm-level gender equality outcomes. In particular, I find that firms acquired by acquirers from more gender-egalitarian countries see a larger increase in female representation in management and a larger decrease in gender pay gap post-acquisition, compared to firms that get acquired by acquirers from less gender-egalitarian countries. This main effect is stronger when the post-acquisition integration process is more thorough and when a new CEO is appointed at the acquired firm. The second essay examines if the consistency between employees’ observed workflow networks and formally prescribed workflows is associated with individual employee performance and examines how gender-role expectations affect this relationship. I find, together with my co-authors, a relationship between the consistency between an employee’s formally prescribed workflow network and their observed workflow network, and their work performance. I find that this relationship between consistency and employee performance is contingent on the employee’s position in the formal structure; employees who are lower in the hierarchy (where roles imply lower levels of autonomy and higher task specificity) receive greater rewards when their actual workflow network is more consistent with their prescribed workflow network. This relationship however weakens for employees who are higher in the hierarchy (where roles imply higher levels of autonomy and lower task specificity). In turn, I find that employees’ gender does not matter for the relationship between workflow network consistency, position in the hierarchy, and individual performance.The third essay considers how gendered workplace contexts affect female employees' network building and in turn their career outcomes. I investigate how gender plays into the relationship between propinquity and network building. I exploit data from a quasi-field experiment leading to the reconfiguration of the seating plan in an office to investigate, following this exogenous shock on spatial proximity, gender differences in how employees form ties with desk neighbors. I further study how this reconfiguration impacts their network positions when said neighbors are experimentally manipulated to be dissimilar in terms of functional membership. I find that reconfiguring the seating plan of an office can help countervail structural and agentic barriers to network brokerage for female employees. Following the reconfiguration, I show that female employees are more likely than male employees to form friendship ties with their new desk neighbors and that women’s friendship networks are more likely to become more brokerage-rich.
Item Open Access Essays on Entrepreneurship and Local Labor Markets(2020) Gupta, Rahul RajThis dissertation explores the relationship between external shocks local labor markets and entrepreneurship. The first and main essay investigates the effects of a large firm's geographical expansion (anchor firm) on local worker transitions into startup employment through wage effects in industries economically proximate to the anchor firm. Using hand collected data on large firms' site searches matched to administrative Census microdata, I exploit lists of anchor firms' site selection process to employ a difference-in-differences approach to compare workers and employers in winning counties to those in counterfactual counties. Counties are balanced along a number of socio-economic characteristics as well as ex ante industry distribution, firm size distribution, and firm age distribution. The arrival of an anchor firm induces entrepreneurship in industries linked through input-output channels by a magnitude of 120 new establishments that account for over 2,300 jobs. Relative to young firms in counterfactual counties, these new firms grow 12% faster in five-year employment growth and have a 7% lower failure probability. These effects are strongest in the most specialized and knowledge-intensive industries. Attracting an anchor firm to account appears to have limited spillover effects in employment that are mainly driven by reorganization of incumbent firms in input-output industries with occupational similarity of the anchor firm that face rising labor costs.
The second essay provides a blueprint for understanding the dynamics surrounding mass layoffs and business closures. This essay creates a novel data set linking geocoded Business Registration data to public layoff notifications data. This data can be used to understand how local entrepreneurship can reduce unemployment spells and earnings penalties for low wage displaced workers. Workers eventually employed by startups experience faster post-displacement wage growth than those eventually employed by mature firms. In final essay, I provide motivation for research investigating the spatially heterogeneous effects the advancement of certain industries inhibit entrepreneurship in others. I decompose a Bartik employment measure of demand for a region's labor. The decomposition shows that the recovery from the Great Recession was led by capital-intensive industries (e.g., transportation manufacturing and machinery manufacturing) that are typically inversely associated with local entrepreneurship. Interestingly, the inverse association of these industries and entrepreneurship appears to spillover into other industries. These industries include transportation equipment manufacturing and machinery manufacturing. This set of observations motivates this dissertation's research agenda to understand the cross-industry relationships that drive an area's level of entrepreneurship and labor market dynamism.
Item Open Access Essays on the Determinants of Public Funding for Universities and the Impact on Innovation and Entrepreneurship(2019) Kim, JoowonThis dissertation is comprised of three studies that investigate the implications and determinants of public funding for universities.
The first chapter lays down the foundation for the other two studies. I discuss how state-level policies, as determined by legislators, represent a pivotal component of firms' non-market strategies that have direct implications for the viability of their innovative and entrepreneurial activities. I expand this discussion to identify gaps in extant studies surrounding state-level policies and state legislators.
The second study focuses on the state funding for 420 public universities to estimate the precise return on state investments in higher education as measured by two economic outcomes -- the generation of university patents and formation of business establishments in a given university's local economy from 2002 through 2014. Using an instrumental variable estimation strategy, I predict and find a positive, causal association between state funding and the number of patents granted to public universities. I also observe a similar causal relationship between state funding and the entry of new business establishments near a given campus. This becomes pronounced for small firms in the manufacturing, retail, and service sectors, and even more for small firms in high-technology industries that are known to rely heavily on universities as a source of external inventions - pharmaceutical, medical equipment, and semiconductor.
The third study explores a new determinant of state funding for 420 public universities by leveraging novel, hand-collected data on the educational experiences of state legislators - specifically if and where they received postsecondary education. I predict and find a statistically significant, positive association between the share of legislators who attended their states' public institutions and state funding for their entire public higher-education system. A similar positive relationship is also observed between the share of state legislators who attended particular campuses of the state's public university system and funding for those campuses. This relationship is more pronounced among publicly educated legislators who represent legislative districts close to their alma mater's district, and becomes most consequential when the legislator's district contains his or her alma mater.