Episode 73: Kailing Shen on Gender Requirements in Job Ads

This paper studies the effect of managers for the performance of public hospitals, specifically following a reform in Chile that changed their recruitment process. The main findings are that the reform decreased mortality, likely through the mechanism of improving the quality of managers (e.g., replacing managers without management degrees with managers with management degrees).

This paper studies what happens when a worker has a different set of values than (a) their boss, or (b) their colleagues. Productivity is lower workers with such value dissonance, and the mechanism appears to be worse worker morale and worse communication between worker and manager.

This paper studies whether the racial diversity of medical providers (mostly doctors) in the hospital, affects the health outcomes of minority patients. There is a big effect and, most importantly, it does not only operate through the concordance between individual patient and individual doctor: having more diverse doctors in the hospital generates positive externalities that go beyond the patient-doctor relation.

This paper studies whether human decision-makers can improve on algorithmic recommendations, in the setting of bail decisions in the criminal justice system. Bail judges receive recommendations from predictive algorithms and can choose to confirm or override them. The paper finds that most judges do not add value beyond the algorithm, although a minority do.

This paper studies who benefits and who suffers from working next to their colleagues, in the context of software engineers. Junior engineers benefit from receiving more feedback from their more experienced colleagues, when the team is located in a single building, as opposed to dispersed over many buildings. On the other hand, this comes at the cost of senior engineers writing less programmes. During the pandemic, everybody moved to working from home, so the difference between single-building and multi-building teams disappeared.