Essays in development, gender and personnel economics

The first two chapters of this thesis provide insights into the determinants of occupational gender segregation in both developed and developing countries. The third chapter of this thesis goes beyond gender to understand how different aspects of individual identity, namely values, affect selection and performance in the workplace. Across the developed world, traditionally female-dominated sectors are growing and traditionally male-dominated sectors are shrinking. And yet, sectorial male shares are not changing accordingly. Why don’t men enter female-dominated occupations? In the first chapter, I study men’s selection into social work, a fast-growing occupation where the share of men has historically been below 25 percent. I embed a field experiment in the UK-wide recruitment of social workers to analyse barriers to men’s entry and the nature of men’s sorting into this occupation. I modify the content of recruitment messages to potential applicants to exogenously vary two key drivers of selection: perceived gender shares and expectations of returns to ability. I find that perceived gender shares do not affect men’s application decisions, which suggests no role for gender identity or social stigma in their choices. Increasing expected returns to ability encourages men to apply, and improves the average quality of the applicants and performance on the job of the new hires, indicating that men are negatively sorted into social work. In turn, a higher (perceived) share of male workers improves the quality of female hires by discouraging the least talented women from applying. These findings suggest that breaking barriers to men’s entry in female-dominated occupations may help employers increase the diversity and overall quality of their workforce. The second chapter deals with gender segregation in the growing urban marketplaces of the developing world. Commerce between strangers requires trust, but trust is difficult when one group consistently fears expropriation by another. If men have a comparative advantage at violence and there is little rule-of-law, then unequal bargaining power can lead women to segregate into low-return industries and avoid entrepreneurship altogether. In this paper, we present a model of female entrepreneurship and rule of law that predicts that women will only start businesses when they have both formal legal protection and informal bargaining power. The model’s predictions are supported both in cross-national data and with a new census of Zambian manufacturers. In Zambia, female entrepreneurs collaborate less, learn less from fellow entrepreneurs, earn less and segregate into industries with more women, but gender differences are ameliorated when women have access to adjudicating institutions, like Market Chiefs and a Small Claims Court. We experimentally induce variation in local institutional quality in an adapted trust game, and find that this also reduces the gender gap in trust and economic activity. The third chapter of this thesis studies the primitives of corporate culture: employees’ values. It is well known that shared values can mitigate the adverse consequences of incomplete contracts and reduce coordination costs. Misalignment in values - either actual or perceived by the employees - could make such inefficiencies worse, reducing productivity and creating resistance to change. We provide evidence by means of a survey that measures the perceived and actual value misalignment between employees, their colleagues, and top management in a multinational bank. The data, which covers 30,000 employees across 55 countries, reveals that values dissonance is negatively correlated with individual and team level performance, as well as with self-reported trust in the bank’s executives and intent to stay. Within countries, we show how bankers’ values compare with the ones listed by World Value Survey respondents. Employees whose values are further from common citizens perform better, but this is mainly explained by their higher position on the career ladder. We conclude by showing how aggregate shocks to societal perceptions of banking, such as the 2008 financial crisis, might shape organizational culture

ENTICED BY POPULARITY? INDIVIDUAL DECISION MAKING WITH SOCIAL CUES IN THE INTERNET ERA.

On the Internet, people have free direct access to information related to the popularity and the quality of products. In many cases, cues hinting to popularity and quality are made prevalent in the interface of the website in order to facilitate the choices made by the users. In addition, many websites use algorithms based on those two attributes to generate the order in which the users see the items. Although this information is an inherent part of many websites little is known about how people integrate these two sources of information. In this study we examine how people use popularity and quality cues for books, films and homemade videos (available at www.amazon.com, www.imdb.com and www.youtube.com, respectively) to choose between alternative options. We implement a binary choice task in which items are presented to the participants simultaneously alongside with cues referring to popularity and quality. All other information (e.g., name, content, author) is withheld to focus on the interaction of these two cues. For each of the three experiments, the experimental task comprised of 200 choices, which were consequential for the participants. We compare the predictive performance of heuristic, probabilistic choice and machine learning models over the collected data. Our results indicate variability between participants but consistent decision rules within each subject. Furthermore, we find that the valence of popularity and quality cues varies across the three websites, indicating environmental features that could lead to the emergence of different decision processes across them

The ecology of social interactions in online and offline environments

The rise in online social networking has brought about a revolution in social relations. However, its effects on offline interactions and its implications for collective well-being are still not clear and are under-investigated. We study the ecology of online and offline interaction in an evolutionary game framework where individuals can adopt different strategies of socialization. Our main result is that the spreading of self-protective behaviors to cope with hostile social environments can lead the economy to non-socially optimal stationary states

Urban density, trust, and knowledge sharing in Lusaka

A recent IGC study looks at the relationship between urban density, in the context of Lusaka, trust and knowledge sharing among small-scale manufacturing firms

Ranking with social cues: Integrating online review scores and popularity information

Online marketplaces, search engines, and databases employ aggregated social information to rank their content for users. Two ranking heuristics commonly implemented to order the available options are the average review score and item popularity-that is, the number of users who have experienced an item. These rules, although easy to implement, only partly reflect actual user preferences, as people may assign values to both average scores and popularity and trade off between the two. How do people integrate these two pieces of social information when making choices? We present two experiments in which we asked participants to choose 200 times among options drawn directly from two widely used online venues: Amazon and IMDb. The only information presented to participants was the average score and the number of reviews, which served as a proxy for popularity. We found that most people are willing to settle for items with somewhat lower average scores if they are more popular. Yet, our study uncovered substantial diversity of preferences among participants, which indicates a sizable potential for personalizing ranking schemes that rely on social information.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, ICWS

Civility vs. incivility in online social interactions: an evolutionary approach

Evidence is growing that forms of incivility–e.g. aggressive and disrespectful behaviors, harassment, hate speech and outrageous claims–are spreading in the population of social networking sites’ (SNS) users. Online social networks such as Facebook allow users to regularly interact with known and unknown others, who can behave either politely or rudely. This leads individuals not only to learn and adopt successful strategies for using the site, but also to condition their own behavior on that of others. Using a mean field approach, we define anevolutionary game framework to analyse the dynamics of civil and uncivil ways of interaction in online social networks and their consequences for collective welfare. Agents can choose to interact with others–politely or rudely–in SNS, or to opt out from online social networks to protect themselves from incivility. We find that, when the initial share of the population of polite users reaches a critical level, civility becomes generalized if its payoff increases more than that of incivility with the spreading of politeness in online interactions. Otherwise, the spreading of self-protective behaviors to cope with online incivility can lead the economyto non-socially optimal stationary state

The ecology of social interactions in online and offline environments

The rise in online social networking has brought about a revolution in social relations. However, its effects on offline interactions and its implications for collective well-being are still not clear and are under-investigated. We study the ecology of online and offline interaction in an evolutionary game framework where individuals can adopt different strategies of socialization. Our main result is that the spreading of self-protective behaviors to cope with hostile social environments can lead the economy to non-socially optimal stationary states

I did it your way: an experimental investigation of peer effects in investment choices

We experimentally investigate imitation in investment decisions and focus on cognitive aspects of decision making. At this aim, we manipulate three main dimensions of choice: time pressure, normative content of social information, and uncertainty of the investment. We document the existence of imitation, with stronger social effects among those who discover to be less cautious than their peers. In line with our hypotheses, a piece of information which is more representative of average group behavior induces stronger imitation. Furthermore, higher time pressure fosters imitation. In contrast to our hypotheses, imitation is weaker for uncertain prospect than for risky prospects

The distinctive values of bankers

The banking sector is sometimes characterized by a dysfunctional culture, but little is known about what values bankers hold. We gather data on employee values in a large multinational bank and measure alignment within the bank and with broader society. We find that bankers at the bottom of the hierarchy hold values that are mirrors of their societies, but the top-ranked bankers hold values that are most distinct from their countries. These distinctive values are those with the greatest impact on performance and potential for promotion, suggesting a possible trade-off between coherence within the organization and dissonance with society