An Empirical Study of Team Formation and Performance, Revise and Resubmit at Management Science

Do self-formed teams outperform other team structures? Using unique data from Virgo, a Nobel-prize-winning scientific organization with self-formed teams, first, I uncover new evidence on team formation and performance. Then, I develop a structural model to estimate which teams perform better, controlling for self-formation and unobserved project characteristics. I find that small teams perform better than large teams. Using the estimates of the model, I evaluate the performance of counterfactual team structures. I show that relative to the status quo of self-formation, a benchmark framework with random teams would underperform, while exogenously imposing team diversity would improve performance.

More than Joints: Multi-Substance Use, Choice Limitations, and Policy Implications (joint with Michelle Sovinsky, Liana Jacobi, and Tao Sun)

As illicit substances move into the legal product space, substitution patterns with legal products become more salient. In particular, marijuana legalization may have implications for the use of other legal “sin” goods. We estimate a structural model of multi-product use of illegal and legal substances considering joint use, limited access to illicit products, and persistence in use. We focus on a young person’s choice to consume marijuana, alcohol or cigarettes (and possible combinations), and we find that sin goods are complements. Furthermore, our findings emphasize the necessity of accounting for joint consumption and access to obtain correct price sensitivity estimates. Post-legalization, youth marijuana use would increase from 25% to 37%. However, counterfactual results show that a combination of (reasonable) tax increases on all goods along with enforcement against illegal use can potentially revert use to pre-legalization levels. The earlier the tax increases are implemented the more effective they are at curbing future use. Our results inform the policy debate regarding the impact of marijuana legalization on the long-term use of sin goods.

Work in Progress

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Networks and Power: Gender Effects of Random Selection Into an Administrative Elite (joint with Bernhard Ganglmair, Nicola Persico, Timothy Simcoe, and Emanuele Tarantino)

Succession in Family Firms (joint with Florian Englmaier, Anna Gumpert, Megha Patnaik, and Fabiano Schivardi) Project website for Germany