Recent updates about my research go here …

• [06/10/2021] – Experimentation and Startup Performance: Evidence from A/B Testing (with Rem Koning and Ronnie Chatterji) is now forthcoming in Management Science.
• [06/10/2021] – Helpful behavior and the durability of collaborative ties (with Sampsa Samila and Alex Oettl) is now forthcoming in Organization Science.
• [06/18 /2021] – Data Exchanges Between Firms (Old title: Some data on the market for data) (with Morad Elsaify) is now forthcoming in Digital Business.

Available on SSRN.

(with Samina Bano, Amod Kumar and Anuj Kumar)

Research suggests that significant gaps in educational and economic achievement across race, ethnicity, and class stem from two deep-rooted sources of inequality— access to good schools and the home environment. In this article, we ask whether mitigating disparities in school access leads to positive behavioral responses at home. We hypothesize that access to educational opportunity (e.g., admission to a coveted school) shapes attitudes to learning and leads to behavioral spillovers at home that could enhance the value of good schools. We test this prediction using unique data on changes to household behavior made by winners and losers of the Right to Education lottery in Uttar Pradesh, India. We find that families whose children are admitted to private schools through RTE engage in more learning-oriented behaviors such as investing in coaching classes, educational materials at home, and the education of siblings. The results appear most robust for children admitted to integrated schools where they are included in the learning environment with all other students.

Available on SSRN

(with Ines Black)

Network hiring—i.e. the preference for hiring workers who are referred by existing employees or have shared affiliations with them—is a prevalent practice across many industries. Considerable research shows hiring within a firm’s network provides soft information about potential hires as well as informal mechanisms of control once they join a company. While research shows that in-network hires perform better, little is known about the firm-level performance implications and the associated trade-offs of this practice. In this article, we study the impact of network hiring by using data on the universe of firms in Portugal between 1994 to 2017. We find that network hiring appears to increase firm performance but at the expense of growth. Furthermore, network hiring seems to provide firms with information on intrinsic motivation traits of the candidates, rather than information on skills. We conclude with a discussion on how this practice should affect the strategy of firms, particularly young ones.

Available on SSRN

(with Todd Hall)

Many startups have embraced formal experimentation—i.e., A/B testing—to improve the performance of their products and services. Experimentation, some have argued, should democratize innovation inside organizations by creating a platform to rigorously test new ideas, regardless of origin. In this article, we argue that experimentation’s promise hinges on having the right organizational decision-making process—one that encourages innovation but without the added risk of unanticipated failures. We study this question by developing a model of experimentation inside organizations where decisions to implement are either centralized or decentralized—a tension identified by practitioners and scholars alike. We find that startups with centralized mechanisms that rely too much on the input of other teams benefit least from experimentation, as do ones with completely decentralized ones. In contrast, startups with mostly decentralized decisions, with a single authority that sets consistent thresholds for implementation, achieve growth but with less downside risk. Thus, without considering the politics that guide organizational decision-making, the benefits of experimentation may be limited.

Work in progress

(with Anuj Kumar)

Innovations in educational technology are proposed by many as a solution to the growing achievement gap in America and abroad. Recently, however, there is increasing concern over whether scarce resources should be allocated to these yet unproven technological interventions—or spent on more proven inputs to educational production (e.g., better-trained teachers). Moreover, recent reports advance the hypothesis that technology may further increase inequality. In this article, we synthesize the literature to develop a framework for understanding the conditions under which technology leads to less, rather than more, equity in educational outcomes. Our analysis indicates that given the uneven distribution of essential inputs to learning—teachers, administration, and family resources—across schools and students of different socioeconomic status, educational technology interventions that ignore these differences will exacerbate existing achievement gaps, not mitigate them.

SSRN Working Paper

(with Ines Black and Rembrand Koning)

Research suggests that increased digitization of the labor market combined with the changing demand for skill has altered the job-search process. In this article, we argue that these changes have led to increased investments in firm-driven search for talent (or `outbound recruiting’). We investigate this question using two data sets, one new. First, we conduct a nationally representative survey of over 13,000 American workers. We find that nearly 18 percent of all employed workers in the US were hired into their present company by the outbound recruiting effort their employer, either directly or through labor market intermediaries such as a headhunter. The share of hiring driven by firm-driven search is greatest among higher-income workers, at 20.3 percent, and those with STEM and business degrees, at 20 percent. Moreover, considerable regional variation exists. For example, over a quarter of Silicon Valley workers are hired in this manner, whereas only 14.5% of those in Rochester are. Second, we complement our worker-level results by analyzing a large sample of job postings in the US economy over the past decade. We find that firms, especially those relying on high-skilled labor, are increasingly developing capabilities to better hunt for talent—hiring more recruiters with skill in online search. Given the growth of this practice, we discuss implications for research on firm strategy and labor markets.

Journal of Organization Design, (9)4, 2020

(with Rembrand Koning)

Can managers influence the formation of organizational networks? In this article, we evaluate the effect of joint tasks on the creation of network ties with data from a novel field experiment with 112 aspiring entrepreneurs. During the study, we randomized individuals to a set of 15 joint tasks varying in duration (week-long teams to 20-minute conversations). We then evaluated the impact of these interactions on the formation and structure of individuals’ social networks. We find strong evidence that these designed interactions led to the systematic creation of new friendship and advice relations as well as changes to the participants’ network centrality. Overall, network ties formed after a randomized interaction account for about one-third the individuals a participant knows, of their friendships, and their advice relations. Nevertheless, roughly 90% of randomized interactions never become social ties of friendship or advice. A key result from our research is that while joint tasks may serve to structure the social consideration set of possible connections, individual preferences strongly shape the structure of networks. As a consequence, there will likely remain a considerable unpredictability in the presence of specific ties even when they are designed.

Available on SSRN

Forthcoming in Management Science

(with Rembrand Koning and Aaron Chatterji)

Recent work argues that experimentation is the appropriate framework for entrepreneurial strategy. We investigate this proposition by exploiting the time-varying adoption of A/B testing technology, which has drastically reduced the cost of experimentally testing business ideas. This paper provides the first evidence of how digital experimentation affects the performance of a large sample of high-technology startups using data that tracks their growth, technology use, and product launches. We find that, despite its prominence in the business press, relatively few firms have adopted A/B testing. However, among those that do, we find increased performance on several critical dimensions, including page views and new product introductions. Furthermore, A/B testing is positively related to tail outcomes, with younger ventures failing faster and older firms being more likely to scale. Firms with experienced managers derive more benefits from A/B testing. Our results inform the emerging literature on entrepreneurial strategy and how digitization and data-driven decision-making are shaping strategy.