Publications

18 May 2021
Book

Launching a Career in the COVID Economy? Here Are 5 Tips.

times—get started on the right foot. “It really is possible to bottle up life experience and tacit knowledge and deconstruct it to accelerate the learning curve,” he says. Ng says that unlocking the best View Details

Keywords: by Carolyn DiPaolo

24 May 2022
Research & Ideas

Career Advice for Minorities and Women: Sharing Your Identity Can Open Doors

Past studies have bolstered the idea that marginalized groups might find more career opportunities if they downplay their identities. But women and minorities may actually benefit by explicitly mentioning their identities, at least when... View Details

Keywords: by Pamela Reynolds

2024
Working Paper

Does Pension Automatic Enrollment Increase Debt? Evidence from a Large-Scale Natural Experiment

By: John Beshears, Matthew Blakstad, James J. Choi, Christopher Firth, John Gathergood, David Laibson, Richard Notley, Jesal D. Sheth, Will Sandbrook and Neil Stewart

Does automatic enrollment into retirement saving increase household debt? We study the randomized roll-out of automatic enrollment pensions to ~160,000 employers in the United Kingdom with 2-29 employees. We find that the additional savings generated through automatic... View Details

Keywords: Retirement; Saving; Personal Finance; Borrowing and Debt; Credit; Compensation and Benefits

Teaching Interest

Developing Yourself as a Leader

By: Ethan S. Bernstein

This course is an online leadership development program for the next generation of leaders (high-potential emerging leaders with rougly 7-15 years of work experience). Over 12 dynamic, high-impact weeks, a cohort of emerging leaders from around the globe engages... View Details

Keywords: Leadership; Leadership Development And Career Planning; Self-assessment; Self-awareness; Design Thinking; Communication; Career Advancement; Leadership Development; Personal Development and Career

Forthcoming
Article

Is Hybrid Work the Best of Both Worlds? Evidence from a Field Experiment

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Tarun Khanna, Christos A. Makridis and Kyle Schirmann

This paper reports causal evidence on how the extent of hybrid work—the number of days worked from home relative to days worked from office—affects employee attitudes and performance. Workers who spent around two days in the office each week on average self-reported... View Details

Keywords: Attitudes; Performance Consistency; Employees; Work-Life Balance

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November 2021
Article

The Effects of Retirement on Sense of Purpose in Life: Crisis or Opportunity?

By: Ayse Yemiscigil, Nattavudh Powdthavee and Ashley V. Whillans

Does retirement lead to an existential crisis or present an opportunity to experience a renewed sense of purpose in life? Prior research has documented a negative association between retirement and sense of purpose in life, suggesting that retirement could lead people... View Details

Keywords: Aging; Meaning; Socioeconomic Status; Life Experiences; Retirement; Well-being

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Research Summary

The Transition to Retirement

By: Teresa M. Amabile

My current major research program is the Retirement Transitions Study: a broad study of retiring professionals' everyday experiences, including identification with work; identity stability, change, and development; meaningfulness of work; changes in life structure,... View Details

Keywords: Careers; Psychology; Creativity; Identity; Retirement; Meaning

March 2022
Article

How Much Does Your Boss Make? The Effects of Salary Comparisons

By: Zoë B. Cullen and Ricardo Perez-Truglia

The vast majority of the pay inequality in an organization comes from differences in pay between employees and their bosses. But are employees aware of these pay disparities? Are employees demotivated by this inequality? To address these questions, we conducted a... View Details

Keywords: Salary; Inequality; Managers; Career Concerns; Pay Transparency; Wages; Equality and Inequality; Perception; Behavior

February 2018
Article

Laboratory Evidence on the Effects of Sponsorship on the Competitive Preferences of Men and Women

By: Nancy R. Baldiga and Katherine Baldiga Coffman

Sponsorship programs have been proposed as one way to promote female advancement in competitive career fields. A sponsor is someone who advocates for a protégé, and in doing so, takes a stake in her success. We use a laboratory experiment to explore two channels... View Details

Keywords: Economics; Behavior And Behavioral Decision Making; Laboratory Experiment; Competition; Organizations; Gender; Behavior

Research Summary

Overview

By: Ethan S. Bernstein

I have spent my career studying novel talent management practices and their effect on collaboration and performance. My core research focuses on two interrelated organizational trends that have become salient in the 21st century: workplace transparency (who gets to... View Details

Article

Joy and Rigor in Behavioral Science

By: Hanne K. Collins, Ashley V. Whillans and Leslie K. John

In the past decade, behavioral science has seen the introduction of beneficial reforms to reduce false positive results. Serving as the motivational backdrop for the present research, we wondered whether these reforms might have unintended negative consequences on... View Details

Keywords: Open Science; Pre-registration; Exploration; Confirmation; False Positives; Career Satisfaction; Science; Research; Personal Development and Career; Satisfaction; Diversity

2020
Working Paper

Social Attachment to Place and Psychic Costs of Geographic Mobility: How Distance from Hometown and Vacation Flexibility Affect Job Performance

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury and Ohchan Kwon

Using a natural experiment and field interviews, this paper studies how social attachment to place imposes psychic costs on workers who experience geographic mobility. This is especially salient when workers are assigned to locations far from their hometown, which may... View Details

Keywords: Distance From Hometown; Social Attachment To Place; Psychic Costs; Worker Performance; Natural Experiment; Geographic Location; Familiarity; Employees; Performance; India

SSRN

August 2021
Article

The Undervalued Power of Self-relevant Research: The Case of Researching Retirement While Retiring

By: Teresa M. Amabile and Douglas T. (Tim) Hall

For decades, training in management research has emphasized objectivity, typically viewed as an arm’s length distance between the topic of the research and the interests of the researcher. This emphasis has led most scholars to avoid research topics of deep personal... View Details

Keywords: Qualitative Research Methods; Case Research Methods; Organizational Behavior; Careers; Career Changes And Transitions; Self-relevant Research; Research; Personal Development and Career; Transition; Identity; Retirement

Article

Credit and Punishment: Are Corporate Bankers Disciplined for Risk-Taking?

By: Janet Gao, Kristoph Kleiner and Joseph Pacelli

We examine whether bankers face disciplining consequences for structuring poorly performing corporate loans. We construct a novel data set containing the employment histories and loan portfolios of a large sample of corporate bankers and find that corporate credit... View Details

Keywords: Syndicated Loans; Credit Events; Career Outcomes; Loan Officers; Banks and Banking; Financing and Loans; Risk Management; Corporate Finance; Personal Development and Career

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Article

Using Fresh Starts to Nudge Increased Retirement Savings

By: John Beshears, Hengchen Dai, Katherine L. Milkman and Shlomo Benartzi

We conducted a field experiment to study the effect of framing future moments in time as new beginnings (or “fresh starts”). University employees (N=6,082) received mailings with an opportunity to choose between increasing their contributions to a savings plan... View Details

Keywords: Choice Architecture; Randomized Field Experiment; Savings; New Beginning; Fresh Start; Saving; Retirement; Behavior