On December 5, 2017, Tuesday, at 4:15 pm in Pettengill G65, Samarth Gupta, an Economics PhD Candidate from Boston University presented “What Do Good Managers Do? Evidence from an Insurance Firm in India.”<\/p>\n
Abstract:<\/span>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Do managers within a firm differ in productivity? If so, what do good managers do? In\u00a0this paper, I use a panel dataset of 211 manager-led teams of salespersons from 2012-2015 in\u00a0an insurance firm in India. I find large performance differences: the ratio of 90th and 10th\u00a0percentile of team output is close to 20 and this ratio for output per worker is 5:1. Further,\u00a0these two metrics are positively correlated. To find what good managers do, I use output per\u00a0worker of each team in 2012 as a metric of managerial ability and correlate it with the outcomes\u00a0of the managerial tasks in from 2013-2015. Managerial ability is positively and significantly\u00a0correlated with the output of their new recruit. When an agent, whose manager exited from\u00a0the firm, is assigned to a new manager quasi-randomly, his output increases only when joining\u00a0a manager in the upper 10th percentile. Further, agents within or across teams do not differ\u00a0in the nature, cost and value of products they sell, ruling out product or market heterogeneity.\u00a0Skill differential, thus, appears to be selection of recruits for most managers and guidance &\u00a0supervision \u00a0for high performing managers. To explore the implications of differences in\u00a0selection, I develop a model where managers differ in the precision of a signal they receive of a\u00a0candidate\u2019s productivity before recruiting him. The model provides the following implications: a)\u00a0negative relation between exit rate and managerial ability, b) positive span of control with\u00a0respect to managerial ability & tenure and c) increasing returns to scale of team output with\u00a0team-size. Empirical results confirm all the implications. The paper demonstrates how skill\u00a0differential across managers may drive productivity variation.<\/p>\n Presented by The Casey Lecture Fund – Economics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On December 5, 2017, Tuesday, at 4:15 pm in Pettengill G65, Samarth…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_batesModPostContentOverride_prepend":false,"_batesModPostContentOverride_append":false,"_batesModPostContentOverride_append_before_footer":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2188"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2188\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2189,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2188\/revisions\/2189"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}