Simon Calmar Andersen
Biographic Data
| ID | 1849455 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Simon Calmar Andersen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Simon Calmar |
| FAMILY NAME | Andersen |
| SIGNATURE | ANDERSEN S C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Aarhus University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5274-6953 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 401 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Masking or lexicographic preferences? Using conjoint experiments to distinguish between two fundamental theories of choice
Many studies on candidate choice and other political preferences suggest that the effect of one attribute may mask the effect of another attribute, which the respondent has no information about. If, for instance, respondents lack information about party membership, they may infer that female candidates are Democrats, which would lead to biased estimates of the pure effect of candidate gender. We propose an alternative explanation—namely that resp…
Nudging Parental Engagement
Engaging citizens in co-producing services is often a challenging task. This study explores strategies to facilitate participation, using the case of shared book reading—a practice widely recognized for enhancing children’s literacy skills. Yet, parents often fall short of their aspirations to read more with their children. We combine a survey experiment and a field experiment in Denmark to assess the effectiveness of reminders as a policy tool t…
Implementation support
The challenges of implementing public policies and interventions have long been recognized, and a wide range of well-documented barriers frequently hinder effective implementation. We develop a framework of implementation support approaches, distinguishing between two types: fidelity and professional responsibility. We test the framework in a large-scale, preregistered field experiment involving 250 Danish schools implementing an evidence-based r…
A learning approach to the governance of professionals. Field experimental evidence
Performance management is used by governments worldwide to incentivize professionals in schools and other public organizations. Yet, much research shows that these incentives may generate perverse dysfunctional effects. Based on a Bayesian model of learning, we propose that simply providing professional teachers with performance information—without changing their extrinsic incentives—may be enough to make them update their beliefs about their stu…
Performance-based accountability systems at the organizational level
Public organizations have widely adopted performance measurement practices that carry significant consequences for both organizations and their employees. This article proposes that the design of these performance-based accountability systems plays a crucial role in shaping organizational performance. First, we develop a typology of performance-based accountability systems, proposing that strong incentives aimed at the organization, rather than t…
Lexicographic Preferences in Candidate Choice. How Party Affiliation Dominates Gender and Race
Understanding which political candidates are elected for office is fundamental to democracy and political science. Whereas there is much agreement that party affiliation is one of the most important candidate characteristics to voters, evidence regarding the gender and race of the candidate is mixed. We suggest voters have lexicographic preferences, meaning they rank their preferences and focus primarily on the candidate's party affiliation. Seco…
Does Work Quality Differ between the Public and Private Sectors? Evidence from Two Online Field Experiments
Understanding the differences between working in the public and private sectors is core to public management research. We assess the implications of a theory of public ownership, testing an expectation that work is of higher quality when performed under public ownership status compared to a private company. We conducted two, pre-registered, field experiments with a routine data processing task and workers recruited through an online labor market.…
A cluster‐randomized trial measuring the effects of a digital learning tool supporting decoding and reading for meaning in grade 2
A large‐scale, cluster‐randomized controlled field trial (N classrooms = 47; N students = 1,013) assessed the impact of a digital text‐to‐speech reading material that supported 8‐year‐olds’ decoding and reading comprehension. An active control group used the most prevalent Danish learning material with a research‐based systematic, explicit phonics approach supporting primarily decoding. The digital tool allows children to read unfamiliar text for…
Academic self perceptions in a national Danish sample
Research on students’ understandings of their academic performance often faces limits with respect to sample diversity, statistical power, breadth of participant information, and ability to continuously track the development of participants. Government registry data do not face such limitations. We validate a brief measure of academic self-perceptions contained within the Danish Well-Being Survey, a self-report measure administered annually to al…
Does parental education influence child educational outcomes? A developmental analysis in a full-population sample and adoptee design
Children's educational outcomes are strongly correlated with their parents' educational attainment. This finding is often attributed to the family environment-assuming, for instance, that parents' behavior and resources affect their children's educational outcomes. However, such inferences of a causal role of the family environment depend on the largely untested assumption that such relationships do not simply reflect genes shared between parent …
How first-language instruction transfers to majority-language skills
With an increasing number of immigrant children in many countries, questions of how to prepare them for further education become highly salient. Few studies have examined the effect of first-language instruction on children’s engagement in school and how that may later transfer into better majority-language outcomes. A randomized controlled trial in Denmark (n = 230) took an asset-based approach to students’ cultural and linguistic backgrounds. W…
A stable relationship between personality and academic performance from childhood through adolescence. An original study and replication in hundred‐thousand‐person samples
OBJECTIVE: Many studies have demonstrated that personality traits predict academic performance for students in high school and college. Much less evidence exists on whether the relationship between personality traits and academic performance changes from childhood to adolescence, and existing studies show very mixed findings. This study tests one hypothesis-that the importance of Agreeableness, Emotional Stability, and Conscientiousness for acade…
Can Reminders and Incentives Improve Implementation Within Government? Evidence from a Field Experiment
Existing research demonstrates how governments can use insights from behavioral science to design policy and alter residents’ behavior. This article proposes that the effect of behavioral interventions may be different in hierarchical organizations where the decision to change behavior and the execution of that decision are split between different individuals. We examine the effect of two small-scale interventions—personal reminders and financial…
Learning from Performance Information
Years of research on performance management has generally concluded that performance information is seldom used purposefully by public managers and that it does not improve performance as intended. More recently, both theoretical and empirical work have begun to focus on situations in which performance management may facilitate internal organizational learning. In this study, we focus on one key component in performance management systems, namely…
The unnoticed influence of peers on educational preferences
Some of the most important decisions young people make are choices about education. Yet recent research shows that educational decisions are poorly explained by classical models of human capital investments: adolescents do not always choose what would best optimize their long-term net outcomes. Instead, students have been shown to be influenced by their current group of peers at the time when they make educational decisions. We expand on existing…
Reducing Minority Discrimination at the Front Line—Combined Survey and Field Experimental Evidence
Despite laws of universalistic treatment, bureaucrats have been shown to discriminate against minorities. A crucial question for public administration is how bureaucracies can be organized in ways that minimize illegitimate discrimination. Especially, since theories suggest that prejudices happen unintentionally and particularly under high workload, bureaucrats’ working conditions may be important. Four randomized experiments support the notion t…
How Do Socially Distinctive Newcomers Fare? Evidence from a Field Experiment
New hires offer a mixed blessing. They can spur teams to reflect on their processes in ways that encourage learning. But organizational newcomers may also struggle to achieve inclusion. This article examines how newcomers' experiences in public organizations depend on their social distinctiveness. While diversity is usually framed in terms of biodemographic factors such as race and gender, educational background is another form of social distinct…
Encouraging Political Voices of Underrepresented Citizens through Coproduction
Not all citizens’ voices are heard with equal strength in the political chorus. Based on studies of policy feedback, we suggest that engaging underrepresented citizens in the production of public services (i.e., making them “coproducers”) increases their political voice. We use a field experiment to test the effect of involving ethnic minorities in the education of their children on their propensity to directly voice their preferences with the ed…
Student-centered instruction and academic achievement
Research in the sociology of education argues that the educational system provides different learning opportunities for students with different socioeconomic backgrounds and that this circumstance makes the educational process an important institutional context for the reproduction of educational inequality. Using combined survey and register data for more than 56,000 students in 825 schools, this article conducts the first empirical test of the …
From Passive to Active Representation—Experimental Evidence on the Role of Normative Values in Shaping White and Minority Bureaucrats’ Policy Attitudes
Studies of representative bureaucracy have shown how minority groups are often underrepresented in public agencies (passive representation) and that the match between bureaucrats' and clients' racial background has important impacts on minority groups (active representation). Much less attention has been devoted to the question of what influences this link from passive to active representation, and, in this case, what factors moderate how bureauc…
Bureaucratic Investments in Expertise
How can elected officials induce bureaucrats to invest in acquiring the expertise necessary to provide high-quality public services? To address this uestion, we test and extend aspects of Gailmard and Patty's expertise model in the context of contemporary governance using a unique randomized controlled field experiment of school principals in Denmark. Consistent with the expertise model, we find that bureaucratic agents randomly assigned greater …
Policy Positions of Bureaucrats at the Front Lines
It is well established that bureaucrats’ implementation of policies is influenced by their own policy positions, that is, their attitudes toward the given policies. However, what affects the policy positions of bureaucrats? This article focuses on whether the policy positions of bureaucrats at the front lines of government are susceptible to frames and cues embedded in communication. Based on the notion that bureaucrats often adhere to certain pr…
Cognitive Biases in Performance Evaluations
Performance evaluations are a central component in the administration of public organizations. The predominant model of how both public managers and citizens evaluate performance suggests that satisfaction judgments about performance are based on a comparison of performance to some adapted standard like expectations or goals. However, in a number of experiments we show that perceptions of performance and satisfaction are formed in ways that are n…
How Leaders Respond to Diversity
Two central governance challenges are directing leadership attention to performance data and the management of diversity. This article examines connections between the two, asking if the introduction of diversity, as a form of organizational change, is associated with greater leadership use of performance data. Diversity is theorized as a double-edged sword for organizations, generating greater innovation, creativity, and performance, but also co…
The Validity of Subjective Performance Measures
Public management studies are increasingly using survey data on managers' perceptions of performance to measure organizational performance. These perceptual measures are tempting to apply because archival performance data or surveys of target group outcomes and satisfaction are often lacking, costly to provide, and are highly policy specific rendering generalization difficult. But are perceptual performance measures valid, and do they generate un…
Reducing Minority Discrimination at the Front Line—Combined Survey and Field Experimental Evidence
Despite laws of universalistic treatment, bureaucrats have been shown to discriminate against minorities. A crucial question for public administration is how bureaucracies can be organized in ways that minimize illegitimate discrimination. Especially, since theories suggest that prejudices happen unintentionally and particularly under high workload, bureaucrats’ working conditions may be important. Four randomized experiments support the notion t…
Cognitive Biases in Performance Evaluations
Performance evaluations are a central component in the administration of public organizations. The predominant model of how both public managers and citizens evaluate performance suggests that satisfaction judgments about performance are based on a comparison of performance to some adapted standard like expectations or goals. However, in a number of experiments we show that perceptions of performance and satisfaction are formed in ways that are n…
Impact of Performance Management in Public and Private Organizations
Recent theoretical developments suggest that management actions have different impacts on outcomes in public and private organizations. This proposition is important to public organizations’ widespread import of private sector management tools such as performance management. This article examines how performance management influences performance outcomes in otherwise similar public and private organizations. Showing that the factors expected to d…
Policy Stability and Organizational Performance
Many scholars have struggled to explain stability and change in public resource allocation. What ultimately matters to most citizens, however, are the effects of such spending patterns on organizational performance. In this article, we investigate the relationship between stability of resource allocation and organizational performance. Using time-series data on municipal school budgets and population data on more than 140,000 students including t…
Learning from Performance Information
Years of research on performance management has generally concluded that performance information is seldom used purposefully by public managers and that it does not improve performance as intended. More recently, both theoretical and empirical work have begun to focus on situations in which performance management may facilitate internal organizational learning. In this study, we focus on one key component in performance management systems, namely…
The Impact of Public Management Reforms on Student Performance in Danish Schools
Many resources have been invested in reforming the public sectors of most countries in the world during the last 20 years. Greater focus on evaluation and performance is one of the most central aspects of these reforms, but despite much academic research virtually no systematic evaluations of the outcome of the reforms themselves are found. This paper presents a study of the effect of performance management reforms of Danish public schools on the…
Bureaucratic Investments in Expertise
How can elected officials induce bureaucrats to invest in acquiring the expertise necessary to provide high-quality public services? To address this uestion, we test and extend aspects of Gailmard and Patty's expertise model in the context of contemporary governance using a unique randomized controlled field experiment of school principals in Denmark. Consistent with the expertise model, we find that bureaucratic agents randomly assigned greater …
The Validity of Subjective Performance Measures
Public management studies are increasingly using survey data on managers' perceptions of performance to measure organizational performance. These perceptual measures are tempting to apply because archival performance data or surveys of target group outcomes and satisfaction are often lacking, costly to provide, and are highly policy specific rendering generalization difficult. But are perceptual performance measures valid, and do they generate un…
From Passive to Active Representation—Experimental Evidence on the Role of Normative Values in Shaping White and Minority Bureaucrats’ Policy Attitudes
Studies of representative bureaucracy have shown how minority groups are often underrepresented in public agencies (passive representation) and that the match between bureaucrats' and clients' racial background has important impacts on minority groups (active representation). Much less attention has been devoted to the question of what influences this link from passive to active representation, and, in this case, what factors moderate how bureauc…
The Unintended Effects of Private School Competition
We examine whether competition from private schools improves public school performance and expenditure. It is difficult methodologically to isolate the effect of competition, but we use new measures of competition in both the public and the private school sector and a data set comprising detailed background information on more than 35,000 public school students in the Danish voucher system. This design provides a relatively firm support for the c…
How Leaders Respond to Diversity
Two central governance challenges are directing leadership attention to performance data and the management of diversity. This article examines connections between the two, asking if the introduction of diversity, as a form of organizational change, is associated with greater leadership use of performance data. Diversity is theorized as a double-edged sword for organizations, generating greater innovation, creativity, and performance, but also co…
Encouraging Political Voices of Underrepresented Citizens through Coproduction
Not all citizens’ voices are heard with equal strength in the political chorus. Based on studies of policy feedback, we suggest that engaging underrepresented citizens in the production of public services (i.e., making them “coproducers”) increases their political voice. We use a field experiment to test the effect of involving ethnic minorities in the education of their children on their propensity to directly voice their preferences with the ed…
Policy Implications of Limiting Immigrant Concentration in Danish Public Schools
Immigrant students in Denmark on average perform worse in lower secondary school than native Danish students. Part of the effect may not stem from the immigrant students themselves, but from the student composition at the school. From a policy perspective, the latter aspect is quite interesting since it is more feasible to change student composition in schools than the socioeconomic status of the individual students. This article describes theore…
Student-centered instruction and academic achievement
Research in the sociology of education argues that the educational system provides different learning opportunities for students with different socioeconomic backgrounds and that this circumstance makes the educational process an important institutional context for the reproduction of educational inequality. Using combined survey and register data for more than 56,000 students in 825 schools, this article conducts the first empirical test of the …
Private Schools and the Parents that Choose Them
Research on the effect of school choice on student performance has generally been based on small‐scale experiments or comparisons of Catholic and public schools in the United States. Recent studies indicate, however, that the market competition stemming from school vouchers does not affect all private schools equally. This study makes use of individual‐level register data on the performance of more than 30,000 students in Denmark, where private s…
How to Improve the Outcome of State Welfare Services. Governance in A Systems-Theoretical Perspective
Much governance literature deals with the limited capacity of the state and the market to govern core state welfare services such as education, scientific research and healthcare. Rather less attention has been focused on how the outcome of these services can be improved politically. An analysis of Niklas Luhmann's systems theory (Luhmann 1997a, 2000) leads to the hypothesis that self-governance, that is, a combination of professional autonomy an…
The unnoticed influence of peers on educational preferences
Some of the most important decisions young people make are choices about education. Yet recent research shows that educational decisions are poorly explained by classical models of human capital investments: adolescents do not always choose what would best optimize their long-term net outcomes. Instead, students have been shown to be influenced by their current group of peers at the time when they make educational decisions. We expand on existing…
Performance-based accountability systems at the organizational level
Public organizations have widely adopted performance measurement practices that carry significant consequences for both organizations and their employees. This article proposes that the design of these performance-based accountability systems plays a crucial role in shaping organizational performance. First, we develop a typology of performance-based accountability systems, proposing that strong incentives aimed at the organization, rather than t…
Does parental education influence child educational outcomes? A developmental analysis in a full-population sample and adoptee design
Children's educational outcomes are strongly correlated with their parents' educational attainment. This finding is often attributed to the family environment-assuming, for instance, that parents' behavior and resources affect their children's educational outcomes. However, such inferences of a causal role of the family environment depend on the largely untested assumption that such relationships do not simply reflect genes shared between parent …
Intensifying Social Exchange Relationships in Public Organizations
In accordance with social exchange theory, prominent streams of management research emphasize the importance of reciprocal exchange relationships between organizations and their employees. When employees perceive themselves as supported by the organization, they reciprocate with increased work motivation. However, we do not know how this knowledge can be developed into management initiatives that increase public employees’ perceived support, beca…
Lexicographic Preferences in Candidate Choice. How Party Affiliation Dominates Gender and Race
Understanding which political candidates are elected for office is fundamental to democracy and political science. Whereas there is much agreement that party affiliation is one of the most important candidate characteristics to voters, evidence regarding the gender and race of the candidate is mixed. We suggest voters have lexicographic preferences, meaning they rank their preferences and focus primarily on the candidate's party affiliation. Seco…
How first-language instruction transfers to majority-language skills
With an increasing number of immigrant children in many countries, questions of how to prepare them for further education become highly salient. Few studies have examined the effect of first-language instruction on children’s engagement in school and how that may later transfer into better majority-language outcomes. A randomized controlled trial in Denmark (n = 230) took an asset-based approach to students’ cultural and linguistic backgrounds. W…
Can Reminders and Incentives Improve Implementation Within Government? Evidence from a Field Experiment
Existing research demonstrates how governments can use insights from behavioral science to design policy and alter residents’ behavior. This article proposes that the effect of behavioral interventions may be different in hierarchical organizations where the decision to change behavior and the execution of that decision are split between different individuals. We examine the effect of two small-scale interventions—personal reminders and financial…
Deliberative Democratic Governance
Recent interest in governance networks comprising actors outside traditional governmental hierarchies has reinforced the issue of efficiency vs. democracy. Are the efficiency gains of this mode of governing won at the expense of democracy? This essay shows a way out of the alleged trade-off by combining two theoretical perspectives: a deliberative theory of democracy and a systems theory account of modern society. It argues that the benefits of t…
Smid ikke metoderne ud med badevandet. Epistemologisk konstruktivisme og dens metodiske konsekvenser
Epistemological constructivism and its methodological consequences The debate about constructivism and its methodological consequences has, on the one hand, confused ontological and epistemological constructivism, and, on the other, erroneously rejected conventional rules of method. This article seeks to unravel some of the main issues. In the first part of the article I analyse four constructivist positions on the basis of their ontological and …
How to Improve the Outcome of State Welfare Services. Governance in A Systems-Theoretical Perspective
Much governance literature deals with the limited capacity of the state and the market to govern core state welfare services such as education, scientific research and healthcare. Rather less attention has been focused on how the outcome of these services can be improved politically. An analysis of Niklas Luhmann's systems theory (Luhmann 1997a, 2000) leads to the hypothesis that self-governance, that is, a combination of professional autonomy an…
The Unintended Effects of Private School Competition
We examine whether competition from private schools improves public school performance and expenditure. It is difficult methodologically to isolate the effect of competition, but we use new measures of competition in both the public and the private school sector and a data set comprising detailed background information on more than 35,000 public school students in the Danish voucher system. This design provides a relatively firm support for the c…
The Impact of Public Management Reforms on Student Performance in Danish Schools
Many resources have been invested in reforming the public sectors of most countries in the world during the last 20 years. Greater focus on evaluation and performance is one of the most central aspects of these reforms, but despite much academic research virtually no systematic evaluations of the outcome of the reforms themselves are found. This paper presents a study of the effect of performance management reforms of Danish public schools on the…
Private Schools and the Parents that Choose Them
Research on the effect of school choice on student performance has generally been based on small‐scale experiments or comparisons of Catholic and public schools in the United States. Recent studies indicate, however, that the market competition stemming from school vouchers does not affect all private schools equally. This study makes use of individual‐level register data on the performance of more than 30,000 students in Denmark, where private s…
Policy Stability and Organizational Performance
Many scholars have struggled to explain stability and change in public resource allocation. What ultimately matters to most citizens, however, are the effects of such spending patterns on organizational performance. In this article, we investigate the relationship between stability of resource allocation and organizational performance. Using time-series data on municipal school budgets and population data on more than 140,000 students including t…
Policy Implications of Limiting Immigrant Concentration in Danish Public Schools
Immigrant students in Denmark on average perform worse in lower secondary school than native Danish students. Part of the effect may not stem from the immigrant students themselves, but from the student composition at the school. From a policy perspective, the latter aspect is quite interesting since it is more feasible to change student composition in schools than the socioeconomic status of the individual students. This article describes theore…
Intensifying Social Exchange Relationships in Public Organizations
In accordance with social exchange theory, prominent streams of management research emphasize the importance of reciprocal exchange relationships between organizations and their employees. When employees perceive themselves as supported by the organization, they reciprocate with increased work motivation. However, we do not know how this knowledge can be developed into management initiatives that increase public employees’ perceived support, beca…
Coproduction and Equity in Public Service Delivery
Public managers and researchers devote much attention to the benefits of coproduction, or the mixing of the productive efforts of public employees and citizens in public service design and delivery. One concern, however, is the distributional consequences of coproduction. This article proposes that disadvantaged citizens may be constrained by a lack of knowledge or other resources necessary to contribute to and benefit from the coproduction proce…
Deliberative Democratic Governance
Recent interest in governance networks comprising actors outside traditional governmental hierarchies has reinforced the issue of efficiency vs. democracy. Are the efficiency gains of this mode of governing won at the expense of democracy? This essay shows a way out of the alleged trade-off by combining two theoretical perspectives: a deliberative theory of democracy and a systems theory account of modern society. It argues that the benefits of t…
Impact of Performance Management in Public and Private Organizations
Recent theoretical developments suggest that management actions have different impacts on outcomes in public and private organizations. This proposition is important to public organizations’ widespread import of private sector management tools such as performance management. This article examines how performance management influences performance outcomes in otherwise similar public and private organizations. Showing that the factors expected to d…
The Validity of Subjective Performance Measures
Public management studies are increasingly using survey data on managers' perceptions of performance to measure organizational performance. These perceptual measures are tempting to apply because archival performance data or surveys of target group outcomes and satisfaction are often lacking, costly to provide, and are highly policy specific rendering generalization difficult. But are perceptual performance measures valid, and do they generate un…
Perceptions of Public and Private Performance
Media, politicians, and reform proponents frequently assert that public sector organizations are inefficient and burdened by administrative procedures. But are negative stereotypes of the public sector reflected in people's perceptions of public service provision? Given the methodological challenges of isolating the perception of publicness from other factors related to public organizations, little is known about whether public organizations have…
Bureaucratic Investments in Expertise
How can elected officials induce bureaucrats to invest in acquiring the expertise necessary to provide high-quality public services? To address this uestion, we test and extend aspects of Gailmard and Patty's expertise model in the context of contemporary governance using a unique randomized controlled field experiment of school principals in Denmark. Consistent with the expertise model, we find that bureaucratic agents randomly assigned greater …
Policy Positions of Bureaucrats at the Front Lines
It is well established that bureaucrats’ implementation of policies is influenced by their own policy positions, that is, their attitudes toward the given policies. However, what affects the policy positions of bureaucrats? This article focuses on whether the policy positions of bureaucrats at the front lines of government are susceptible to frames and cues embedded in communication. Based on the notion that bureaucrats often adhere to certain pr…
Cognitive Biases in Performance Evaluations
Performance evaluations are a central component in the administration of public organizations. The predominant model of how both public managers and citizens evaluate performance suggests that satisfaction judgments about performance are based on a comparison of performance to some adapted standard like expectations or goals. However, in a number of experiments we show that perceptions of performance and satisfaction are formed in ways that are n…
How Leaders Respond to Diversity
Two central governance challenges are directing leadership attention to performance data and the management of diversity. This article examines connections between the two, asking if the introduction of diversity, as a form of organizational change, is associated with greater leadership use of performance data. Diversity is theorized as a double-edged sword for organizations, generating greater innovation, creativity, and performance, but also co…
Student-centered instruction and academic achievement
Research in the sociology of education argues that the educational system provides different learning opportunities for students with different socioeconomic backgrounds and that this circumstance makes the educational process an important institutional context for the reproduction of educational inequality. Using combined survey and register data for more than 56,000 students in 825 schools, this article conducts the first empirical test of the …
From Passive to Active Representation—Experimental Evidence on the Role of Normative Values in Shaping White and Minority Bureaucrats’ Policy Attitudes
Studies of representative bureaucracy have shown how minority groups are often underrepresented in public agencies (passive representation) and that the match between bureaucrats' and clients' racial background has important impacts on minority groups (active representation). Much less attention has been devoted to the question of what influences this link from passive to active representation, and, in this case, what factors moderate how bureauc…
How Do Socially Distinctive Newcomers Fare? Evidence from a Field Experiment
New hires offer a mixed blessing. They can spur teams to reflect on their processes in ways that encourage learning. But organizational newcomers may also struggle to achieve inclusion. This article examines how newcomers' experiences in public organizations depend on their social distinctiveness. While diversity is usually framed in terms of biodemographic factors such as race and gender, educational background is another form of social distinct…
Encouraging Political Voices of Underrepresented Citizens through Coproduction
Not all citizens’ voices are heard with equal strength in the political chorus. Based on studies of policy feedback, we suggest that engaging underrepresented citizens in the production of public services (i.e., making them “coproducers”) increases their political voice. We use a field experiment to test the effect of involving ethnic minorities in the education of their children on their propensity to directly voice their preferences with the ed…
The unnoticed influence of peers on educational preferences
Some of the most important decisions young people make are choices about education. Yet recent research shows that educational decisions are poorly explained by classical models of human capital investments: adolescents do not always choose what would best optimize their long-term net outcomes. Instead, students have been shown to be influenced by their current group of peers at the time when they make educational decisions. We expand on existing…
Reducing Minority Discrimination at the Front Line—Combined Survey and Field Experimental Evidence
Despite laws of universalistic treatment, bureaucrats have been shown to discriminate against minorities. A crucial question for public administration is how bureaucracies can be organized in ways that minimize illegitimate discrimination. Especially, since theories suggest that prejudices happen unintentionally and particularly under high workload, bureaucrats’ working conditions may be important. Four randomized experiments support the notion t…
A stable relationship between personality and academic performance from childhood through adolescence. An original study and replication in hundred‐thousand‐person samples
OBJECTIVE: Many studies have demonstrated that personality traits predict academic performance for students in high school and college. Much less evidence exists on whether the relationship between personality traits and academic performance changes from childhood to adolescence, and existing studies show very mixed findings. This study tests one hypothesis-that the importance of Agreeableness, Emotional Stability, and Conscientiousness for acade…
Can Reminders and Incentives Improve Implementation Within Government? Evidence from a Field Experiment
Existing research demonstrates how governments can use insights from behavioral science to design policy and alter residents’ behavior. This article proposes that the effect of behavioral interventions may be different in hierarchical organizations where the decision to change behavior and the execution of that decision are split between different individuals. We examine the effect of two small-scale interventions—personal reminders and financial…
Political science (23 works) · Economics (17 works) · Psychology (17 works) · Public Policy and Administration Research (13 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Business (12 works) · Law (8 works) · Public Administration (8 works) · Public economics (8 works) · Public relations (8 works)