The Douglass North Best Book Award
Monika Nalepa, "After Authoritarianism."
The central insight of "After Authoritarianism" is that while transitional justice has been widely studied in the last half century, from an institutional perspective the way transitional justice is administered involves two very different institutional forms. The first is purging the government of members of the previous authoritarian regime. The second is seeking to uncover both the members of the authoritarian regime and their collaborators, in the form of truth commissions and lustration. Based on a thorough collection of cases and details about democratic transitions and an insightful theoretical analysis of the two institutional forms, Nalepa concludes that while “new democracies embarking on transitional justice ought to tread lightly when it comes to purging their ancien régimes of known collaborators. At the same time, when it comes to dealing with acts of secret collaboration, transparency mechanisms – such as truth commissions, but especially lustrations – can be used without such limitations.”
The Ronald H. Coase Dissertation Award
Virginia Minni, "Essays on the Allocation, Coordination, and Selection of Workers", Department of Economics, London School of Economics and Political Science
Virginia Minni’s dissertation speaks to a series of questions at the heart of organizational economics. In her first essay, Minni focuses on the allocation of workers within a firm, highlighting the importance of high-performing managers for improving worker productivity. A good manager, she shows, can have a lasting, positive impact on workers’ career trajectories through improving the fit between the available labor pool and specialized job within a firm. To show this, Minni makes use of an incredible dataset of administrative records for a multi-national firm, following over 200,000 workers and 30,000 managers over a 10-year period in 100 countries. Using the lateral rotation of managers as a natural experiment, Minni shows that workers who gain a high-flying manager, one whose own career progression was especially fast, are more likely to move laterally and vertically within the firm. She further shows that this reallocation of talent has important benefits for workers’ longer-term job performance, career progression, and compensation as well as firm profits. Her analysis provides important insight on a topic that is both of central importance to our discipline and extremely challenging to study empirically.
Her second essay provides a different perspective on the role of talent and leadership within organizations using experimental evidence from a very different setting: labor unions in Myanmar. Using two sets of field experiments, Minni and her coauthors provide interesting evidence that union leaders play an important coordinating role in setting expectations for worker behavior and in consolidating consensus around the organizational priorities of the union. In her final essay, Minni and her coauthors use rich administrative data from a multinational firm to provide new evidence on the determinants of differences in female labor force participation across countries. The committee was impressed by the extraordinary empirical breadth of this dissertation as well as the rigor and thoughtfulness of the analysis. Taken together, the essays make an important contribution to our understanding of leadership and labor allocation within firms and organizations.
Minni’s dissertation is at the very heart of the Coasian tradition that makes SIOE the important organization that it is. This is a very well-deserved award for a very promising scholar.
The Oliver E. Williamson Best Conference Paper Award:
Jacob Kohlhepp (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), "The Inner Beauty of Firms."
Market competition shapes the structure and processes of firms, but how are market outcomes shaped by the capacity of firms to organize their processes? Jacob Kohlhepp addresses this fascinating question with a unique dataset on beauty salons in the USA.
Kohlhepp observes that beauty salons differ substantially in the degree to which workers are specialized to carry out certain actions like washing hair, cutting, or blow-drying, while others are not. More specialized salons are more productive, but specialization has costs, for instance, the communication needed to coordinate activities within the salon. These costs differ across managers.
Detailed data from all salons that use a certain software allow for identification of price sensitivity, worker skill sets and material costs, but even more, also for a lower bound of the costs associated with specialization. The model can be used to estimate the effects of shocks to this, specific, labor market and shows that productivity effects of shocks will be underestimated when the costs of reorganization are not taken into account.
The paper makes an important step forward to a better understanding of the complex interactions between market forces, exogenous shocks and the effects of management and organization on productivity and wages. It is a showcase of what organizational economics can do in times in which detailed datasets on the internal economics of firms are becoming available.