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My research focuses on the selection, recruitment and allocation of talent in private and public sector organizations.
Fields: Development, Labor and Organizations
Contact information:
Email: guoxu@haas.berkeley.edu
Phone: +1 - 510 - 664 5064
Mailing: Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley
2220 Piedmond Ave, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
[Curriculum Vitae] [Google Scholar] [Twitter]
Work in progress
The Costs of Patronage: Evidence from the British Empire [+]
Covered on the World Bank Development Impact Blog, the Society for Institutional & Organizational Economics and the IGC Blog
I study how patronage affects the promotion and performance of senior bureaucrats within a global organization: the British Empire. I combine newly digitized personnel and public finance data from the colonial administration 1854-1966 to study the inner workings of a bureaucracy that controlled close to a fifth of the earth's land mass at its peak. Exploiting the ministerial turnover in London as a source of within-governor variation in social connections, I find that governors are more likely to be promoted to higher salaried colonies when connected to their superior during the period of patronage. At the same time, they provide more tax exemptions, generate less revenue, invest less and are less likely to be recognized for their service. The promotion and performance gaps disappear after the abolition of patronage appointments. Exploiting a fixed allocation rule to predict the appointment of connected governors unrelated to colony characteristics, colonies administered for longer periods by connected governors during the period of patronage exhibit lower fiscal capacity today. Exposure to connected governors after the removal of patronage has no long-run impact.
The Costs of Bureaucratic Rigidity: Evidence from the Indian Administrative Service [+] - with Marianne Bertrand, Robin Burgess and Arunish Chawla
[A previous version was circulated under the title "Determinants and Consequences of Bureaucratic Effectiveness: Evidence from the Indian Administrative Service"]
Using a stakeholder survey and rich administrative data we study elite civil servants in India. We find that officers that enter state cadres older and in larger cohorts are less effective and more likely to be suspended. We argue that this is due to weaker promotion prospects and career incentives. We demonstrate that states which contain a higher proportion of these officers grow less quickly and that these effects are driven by senior officers and felt most acutely in the organized industrial and service sectors of the economy. Career concerns of bureaucrats therefore affect both their effectiveness and aggregate economic performance.
How Does Collective Reputation Affect Hiring? Selection and Sorting in an Online Labour Market [+] - STICERD EOPP Discussion Paper Series 54
Using data from an online labour market where the country of residence is the
salient group characteristic, we document a mechanism through which collective reputation
perpetuates group inequality. Using an IV strategy, we identify reputational
externalities between an employer's first hire and the propensity to contract more workers
from the same country. Employers, contingent on their first worker's performance,
continue to almost exclusively hire from the same country. This coincides with a positive
sorting response: Observing their predecessor's success, workers from the same
country disproportionately apply and are of higher quality. Employers, facing better
applicants, in turn provide higher ratings.
Confidence Men? Gender and Confidence: Evidence among Top Economists [+] - with Heather Sarsons Covered on LSE Impact Blog, Politics and Policy, and USAPP
Does a confidence gap exist between men and women who made it to the top
of their careers? Using data from economists working in top U.S. universities,
we find that women are less confident than men along two margins. When
asked about their level of agreement on survey questions about the economy,
women are less likely to give "extreme" answers in which they strongly agree
or disagree. Women are also less confident in the accuracy of their answer.
We provide evidence that the confidence gap is driven by women being less
confident when asked questions outside their field of expertise.
Publications
Rewarding Schooling Success and Perceived Returns to Education: Evidence from India [+] - with Sandra Sequeira and Johannes Spinnewijn - Forthcoming Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization
This paper tests two specific mechanisms through which individuals can form
expectations about returns to investments in education: recognition for
schooling performance, and exposure to successful students through family or
social networks. Using a regression discontinuity design, we study the
impact of two fellowship programs recognizing educational performance in
secondary schools in India. We find that the fellowship award is associated
with a significant increase in the perceived value of education, by both
increasing the perceived mean of earnings (0.74 standard deviations (SD)) and decreasing the
perceived variance in earnings (1.03 SD) associated with additional years of
schooling. The effects spill over only selectively to social and family
networks. Peers exposed to successful students do not update their beliefs
but parents of fellows report higher perceived returns to education. Peers
of fellows are however more informed about fellowship opportunities and
report a higher intention to apply for the fellowship, thus contributing to
the persistence of the potential impact of the fellowship across different
cohorts.
Publications (Pre-PhD) [+]
Who gives aid to whom and when? Aid accelerations, shocks and policies [+], European Journal of Political Economy, 2012, Elsevier, vol. 28 (4), pages 593-606 - with Tilman Brueck
We address the pitfalls of averaging by exploiting the longitudinal variation in aid to identify sudden and sharp increases in aid flows. Focusing on specific events, we test if aid accelerations correspond to policies and shocks in the recipient country. We find that positive regime changes and wars are significant predictors of aid accelerations. The results also suggest the presence of aid spill-overs, where neighbors of war-torn countries are almost as likely to experience large aid inflows. Disaggregating aid flows by donors, we find some indicative evidence for competing allocation rules among European donors. We argue that drivers of aid accelerations differ from drivers of average aid flows—a distinction that can help reconcile some of the ambiguous empirical results in the aid literature.
Growth accelerations revisited [+], Econ Journal Watch, January 2011, vol. 8 (1), pages 39-56 - MSc Development Studies dissertation
Hausmann, Pritchett, and Rodrik (2005) found that political regime changes, external shocks and economic reforms are statistically significant predictors of growth accelerations. Updating the data from 1992 up to 2000 and correcting for coding errors, this paper argues that the original results are fragile upon changes in period, sample, measures, and inclusion of controls. All the data are provided in a linked appendix.
Policy papers [+]
