Research

Working Papers

It’s Not About the Money - Or Is It? Leadership and the Gender Application Gap
Single-authored
Abstract

A key supply-side factor contributing to gender gaps in pay and representation in leadership is a gender gap in applications for those positions. With salaries becoming increasingly observable at the application stage, understanding the role of different salary levels in application behavior is important. Using a laboratory experiment, I i) study the role of different salary levels on the gender application gap, ii) examine underlying mechanisms and iii) test a potential solution to mitigate any salary-induced gender application gap. I find a substantial gender gap in the willingness to apply only for highly paid positions: women are 12% less willing to pay than men to acquire these roles despite performing equally well as leaders. While risk attitudes and confidence do not drive the application gap, I find that the gender difference can be explained by men’s general higher willingness to claim the lead, which is salary-dependent and gets activated for high salary positions. Additionally, the high salary position is associated with a shift in the perceived stereotype about leadership from female-typed to male-typed, especially among men. Randomly assigning prior leadership experience, a potential solution, does on average not reduce the gender application gap.

Work in Progress

Gender Discrimination against Pre-PhD Students: Evidence from a Field Experiment
with Philipp Dörrenberg and Christoph Feldhaus

  • Data collection completed
  • Manuscript in preparation
Onboarding, Matching, and Employee Turnover - A Field Experiment
with Dirk Sliwka and Timo Vogelsang
Abstract

We evaluate how a low-cost onboarding practice at the beginning of the employment affects turnover among newly hired frontline employees. In partnership with a large German retail chain, we ran a field experiment across more than 900 stores and 2371 new hires (August 2024 - July 2025). Treated stores implemented a structured welcome intervention: managers announced the newcomer in advance and hosted a brief social event with their colleagues on the first day, while control stores continued with business-as-usual onboarding. The intervention increases separations in the first month of employment by about 2 percentage points while cumulative separations over three and six months are largely unchanged, in line with the view that the intervention accelerates mutual learning about match quality. Both stayers and movers in the treatment group have higher working hours indicating that the treatment also fostered employee motivation.

  • Data collection completed
  • Draft available upon request

AI or human? Applicants’ decisions in discrimination settings
with Luisa Santiago Wolf and David Stommel

Building Better Managers for the Future of Work
with David J. Deming, Joe Vecci, and Ben Weidmann

  • Design stage