IWER Seminars

Nathan Wilmers, MIT Sloan School of Management
Aligning Inequalities: Organizational Sources of Wage Inequality, 1999-2018

The two main sources of pay premiums in the US labor market---occupation and workplace---have increasingly coalesced into a single axis of advantage.  High- and low-skilled occupations are more likely to be employed at corresponding high- and low-paying workplaces.  Drawing on restricted-use US occupation-by-workplace microdata, we show that half of increased wage inequality since 1999 is due to this rising correlation of workplace and occupation pay premiums.  What drives increased alignment between these inequalities?  We rule out shifting industry composition and firm entry and exit.  The main source of alignment is organizational changes in job structure and pay rates.  Consistent with prior research, increased outsourcing and the rise of high-paying, high-skill star firms both contribute to inequality alignment.  A smaller part is attributable to pay cuts and upskilling by high-paying employers of low-skilled workers, like those in manufacturing and transportation.  But, the largest source of increased alignment is that some low-paying but high-professional share workplaces, like hospitals and schools, have deskilled their jobs, while others have raised pay.  These sectors are often government regulated or run, suggesting scope for policy intervention in this process.  Broadly, the results demonstrate an understudied way that organizations affect wage inequality: not by directly increasing variability in workplace or occupation premiums, but by aligning these two sources of inequality.

Diane E. Bailey, Cornell University

Expanding University Audit Cultures and Opaque Metrics: The New Technologies of Control
 

Abstract: Prompted by a new managerialism whose roots lie in neoliberal economic policies, the rise of university “audit cultures” over the past three decades has increased the potential for administrative control of the work of professors. In this talk, I explore how the new data and analytics systems that have become ubiquitous in the everyday work of professors are well poised to expand university audit cultures by enabling the rising quantification that measures,monitors, and controls professors’ work performance. After summarizing literature that documents the emergence of audit cultures in universities, I will describe the various data and analytics systems currently available for university and professor use in each area of professors’ work: teaching, research, and service. I will discuss current features of these systems and the potential back-end analytics that could be performed with the data that system use generates and suggest how these analytics might prompt new metrics as additional control mechanisms over professors as administrators face increasing pressure to run universities in a corporatized manner. The talk will conclude with consideration of possible outcomes of and responses to such an expansion of university audit cultures.

No Seminar

 Sarah Damaske, PennState
Job Loss and the Second Shift

When you lose your job, you gain time. But does this time bonus fundamentally change how the newly unemployed divide household labor? This paper uses data from a sample of 100 qualitative interviews with working- and middle- class men and women to parse out exactly how and why the unemployed take up (or don’t) additional housework and childcare chores. Women did more of the routine household chores than men did before they lost their jobs. After a job loss, men’s chores increased just a bit. In contrast, most women (particularly working-class women) became primarily responsible for all routine tasks. Likewise, women did more childcare before they lost their jobs; afterwards the majority of middle- and working-class women reported that they alone were responsible for childcare tasks. In contrast, post job loss, the majority of men now shared childcare equally and about a quarter had wives who remained primarily responsible for the children. The unemployed women were not comfortable leaving chores undone for their working spouses; the unemployed men were. Moreover, men did not connect feelings of guilt about their job loss to their additional free time at home or their need to do more household, but women commonly did.

 Zoe Cullen, Harvard Business School
The Old Boys' Club: Schmoozing and the Gender Gap 

  
Offices are social places. Employees and managers take coffee breaks together, go to lunch, hang out over drinks, and talk about family and hobbies. In this study, we provide evidence that social interactions with the manager can be advantageous for career progression, and that this phenomenon can account for a significant share of the gender pay gap. We use administrative and survey data from a large financial institution. We estimate the causal effect of managers' gender on their employees' career progression by means of an event- study analysis of manager rotation. We find that when male employees are assigned to male managers, they are promoted faster in the following years than they would have been if they were assigned to female managers; female employees, on the contrary, have the same career progression regardless of the manager's gender. These differences are not accompanied by any differences in effort or performance, and can explain a third of the gender gap in promotions at this firm. Then, we provide evidence that the effects are driven by the social interactions with their managers. We show that the effects are more pronounced for employees who work in close proximity to their manager and coincide with an uptake in the share of breaks taken with the manager. Last, we show that a different shock to social interactions has similar effects even among male employees: when male employees who smoke transition to male managers who smoke, they take breaks with their managers more often and are subsequently promoted at higher rates.

CANCELLED: Christina Ciocca Eller, Harvard University

No Seminar

No Seminar

CANCELLED: Shannon Gleeson, Cornell University

CANCELLED: Greg Distelhorst, University of Toronto

CANCELLED: David Weil, Brandeis

CANCELLED: Duanyi Yang, MIT Sloan School of Management

CANCELLED: Alex Kowalski and Erin Kelly, MIT Sloan School of Management

CANCELLED: Peter Q. Blair, Harvard Graduate School of Education

CANCELLED: Thomas Kochan, Mike Piore, Paul Osterman, MIT Sloan School of Management

Reconvening Discussion

Adam Cobb, Wharton, Management Department

The Effects of Pay Dispersion and Work-Unit Demography on Employee Turnover Download Abstract

Aruna Ranganathan, Stanford Graduate School of Business, Organizational Behavior
 

Stooping Down to Succeed: How Female Supervisors Motivate Worker Productivity in an Indian Garment Factory Download Abstract

Amanda Pallais, Harvard University, Dept. of Economics
 

Valuing Alternative Work Arrangements Download Abstract & Paper

John Van Reenen, MIT Sloan School of Management, Applied Economics
 

The Fall of the Labor Share and the Rise of Superstar Firms Download Abstract

Heejung Chung, University of Kent, UK, School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research
 

Why Flexible Working Does Not Always Reduce Work-Family Conflict Download Abstract

Dionne Pohler, University of Toronto, Centre for Industrial Relations & Human Resources
 

The Compliance Behavior of Multinationals in a Developed Country: An Empirical Assessment of Regulatory Employment Practices Using Administrative Data From Ontario  Download Abstract

Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, Brandeis
Neil Gershenfeld, MIT Center for Bits and Atoms
Alan Gershenfeld, E-Line Media
 

The Future of Work in the Third Digital Revolution:  What if Anyone Could Make (almost) Anything? Download Introduction

Jackson Lu, Columbia Business School

Joint IWER/OS Seminar, 12:30 – 2:30pm in room E62-350
 

Global Leader or Foreign Traitor? The Divergent Effects of International Experiences on Leadership Effectiveness vs. Leadership Selection Download Abstract

Teresa Ghilarducci, The New School for Social Research
 

Nudge Economics and Working Longer: Inadequate Responses to the Retirement Time Inequality Download Abstract

Alex Kowalski, MIT Sloan School of Management
 

Does It Matter That There is No “I” in “Team”? Evaluating the trade-offs of individual- and group-based incentives in a single setting Download Abstract

Thomas Kochan, Erin Kelly, William Kimball, and Duanyi Yang
 

Worker Voice in America:  A Current Assessment and Exploration of Options Download Abstract

Megan Larcom, Jenny Weissbourd, Jeremy Avins (MBA Students (MIT Sloan HKS dual-degree program)
 

New Forms of Worker Voice in the 21^st Century

Kathleen McGinn, Harvard Business School
 

Breaking from Tradition: Women’s Labor Force Participation and Investments in Females in Rural Gujarat, 1981-2011
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Jody Hoffer-Gittell, Brandeis University
 

Relational Coordination Theory: A Systematic Review of Evidence Across Countries and Industries
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Justin Steil, MIT Urban Planning

Simon Jager, MIT Economics

Erin Kelly, MIT  IWER
 

Making Work Work: Work Redesign at the Work-Life Frontier
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Chris Winship, Harvard University, Dept. of Sociology
 

Inchoate Situations and Extra-Rational Behavior
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Kevin Lang, Boston University, Dept. of Economics
 

The Determinants of Teachers’ Occupational Choice
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Paul Osterman, MIT IWER & Michael Piore, MIT Economics
 

In Search of the High Road:  What Is It and Does It Exist?
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Steve Viscelli, University of Pennsylvania, Sociology
 

Driverless and Door to Door? Autonomous Trucks, Ecommerce, the “Uberization” of Freight and the Future of the American Trucker
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Hilary Robinson, Wesleyan