TITLE: Identifying Managerial Skill (joint with: Ben Weidmann (Harvard), Joe Vecci (Gothenburg), Farah Said (Lahore), David Deming (Harvard))

ABSTRACT: We know that managers matter but we do not know how to prospectively identify good managers. We demonstrate the potential of using repeated random assignment to identify the causal contribution managers make to teams, and the measurable skills associated with this. We randomly assign managers to multiple teams, and predict team performance based on the team’s endowment of productive skill. Some managers consistently cause their teams to exceed predicted performance. Managerial skills are roughly as important to team outcomes as worker productivity. Good managers score higher on measures of allocative skill, and there are no differences in managerial skill across gender, age and ethnicity. We experimentally evaluate different methods of manager selection. People who select into managerial roles are typically not better managers than those appointed by lottery. However, selecting managers based on allocative skill dramatically improves team performance.

Title: Marriage and the Intergenerational Mobility of Women: Evidence from Marriage Certificates 1850-1920 

Abstract: Due to data limitations, long-run changes in women’s economic mobility are not well understood. Using a set of marriage certificates from Massachusetts over the period of 1850-1920, we link women and men to their childhood and adult census records to obtain a measure of occupational standing across two generations. Intergenerational mobility was higher for women than for men in the earliest 1850-70 cohort. Men’s mobility increases by the 1880-1900 cohort, whereas women’s does not, leading to a convergence. During a period with low married women’s labor force participation, the choice of a partner was crucial for women’s economic status. We find evidence of strong and increasing assortative matching prior to 1880, followed by declines to the 1900-20 cohort. Absent the increase in marital sorting, married women would have experienced the same increases in intergenerational mobility as did men in the sample. Finally, both men and women in the youngest cohort experience an increase in mobility and decreases in marital sorting, consistent with the widespread expansion of educational attainment during the “High School Movement."

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Title: Homeward Bound: How Migrants Seek Out Familiar Climates (with Marguerite Obolensky, Charles A Taylor)..