Dissertation Defense: "Essays in Personnel Economics", Lei Yue
Speaker
Lei Yue, University of California, Santa Barbara
Biography
Lei Yue is a PhD candidate in the Department of Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research broadly spans labor, personnel, and behavioral economics, with a particular interest in studying worker's incentives and behavioral patterns. In addition, she conducts experiments to explore individuals' decision-making processes.
Event Details
Join us to hear Lei’s dissertation defense. She will be presenting her dissertation titled, "Essays in Personnel Economics". To access a copy of the dissertation, you must have an active UCSB NetID and password.
Abstract
This dissertation consists of three essays in personnel economics that investigate gender disparities in work hours and salary progression, implicit input-based pay, and fairness assessments in hiring decisions.
The first chapter studies gender disparities among engineers in the technology sector, using granular data from a Chinese tech company that tracks precise work hours. I first document a raw gender gap in hours worked, with female engineers working 10 fewer hours per month than their male counterparts. This gap narrows slightly to 9 hours after adjusting for demographic and job-related controls but doubles for married women. To analyze how hours worked influence salary progression—a proxy for career progression, as performance rewards and promotions typically lead to higher base salaries—I construct salary progression spells and apply discrete hazard models. Results reveal persistent gender gaps across various measures of salary increases (‘raises’), even after controlling for hours and other observables. In particular, women have a 12 percent lower likelihood of receiving a raise. While hours worked positively affect the likelihood, women’s return to hours is three times that of men’s. Decomposition results further indicate that gender differences in hours account for 15% of the covariate-adjusted gender gap in raise likelihood that cannot be explained by other observables. These findings suggest that hours worked serve as a signal of commitment or productivity.
The second chapter, based on joint work with Peter Kuhn, studies the effects of time worked—daily hours and days worked—on workers’ bonuses and promotions in an environment where productivity data is not collected, no formal link exists between time worked and pay, and all absent days are approved uses of leave to which workers are entitled. Using digitally collected sign-in/sign-out data, we find that managers implicitly penalize leave-taking when awarding both bonuses and promotions: One additional absent day per month reduces the probability of receiving a bonus by 1.16 percent, the size of positive bonuses by 0.87 percent, and the probability of being promoted to a higher position by 0.79 percent. Mean hours on days worked do not affect promotions, but have a small positive effect on bonus rates among workers whose absences are above average. Finally, we find that workers’ absence rates are highest in the first half of each promotion cycle, suggesting a strategic response to the managers’ implicit reward policies.
The third chapter, based on joint work with Peter Kuhn and Trevor Osaki, measures how people’s assessments of the fairness of race-based hiring decisions vary with the characteristics of the discriminator, the race of the discriminatee, and the reasons why a discriminatory action was taken, using a vignette-based survey experiment on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. We find that conservative respondents are much more accepting of discriminatory actions than others, and that only moderates’ and liberals fairness ratings vary with the discriminatee’s race. In contrast, respondents of all political leanings react in very similar ways to the reasons why a discriminatory action was taken: Statistical discrimination is fairer when more accurate information is used, and indulging one’s own racial animus is less fair than accommodating one’s customers’ animus. Overall, we argue that a two-group framework, in which one group (mostly self-described conservatives) values employers’ decision rights and the remaining respondents value utilitarian concerns, explains our main findings well. In this framework, both groups also value applying a consistent set of fairness rules in a race-blind manner.
JEL Codes: J16, J22, J31, J71, M52
