Publications
Barrymore, Nathan, Cristian Dezsö and Ben King. “Gender and Competitiveness when Earning for Others: Experimental Evidence and Implications for Sponsorship.” Strategic Management Journal, 2022. [SMJ]
Career paths depend not only on individuals’ own competitiveness but also on the competitiveness of others in a position to advocate for them. In this paper we study competitiveness when rewards accrue to another individual. In particular, we ask how female and male managers’ competitiveness changes when rewards from competition accrue to their female or male protégés, relative to when they accrue to themselves. Using an experimental approach, we find that when rewards accrue to protégés male and female managers are equally competitive because female managers increase their competitiveness. However, male managers compete more for male rather than female protégés. This gap disappears when male managers know their protégés’ risk preferences suggesting a novel intervention to ensure equity in the sponsorship process.
Working Papers
Barrymore, Nathan and Rachelle C. Sampson. “When Can Employers Pay Poverty Wages? The Relationship Between Living Wages, Monopsony, and Employee Turnover.” [SSRN]
Employees have been quitting at higher rates over the past years, leading to what has been deemed “the great resignation.” This has happened alongside wages stagnating for those in the bottom quintile of the wage distribution, leading to a significant number of US workers earning below a living wage. This paper asks: when does paying below a living wage increase a firm’s turnover rate? While prior studies provide evidence of a relationship between wages and turnover in specific contexts, we employ a large panel dataset across geography, firms, industry and job type, identifying wages and turnover at a level of granularity and breadth previously unexamined. We explore nuance in the relationship between wages and turnover as well as focus on low wage job categories specifically since lower wages impact workers in low wage jobs most and generate the greatest societal cost. Further, our descriptive evidence shows that the relationship between wages and turnover differs between low and high wage workers, suggesting that underlying mechanisms differ by wage levels. With an instrumental variables approach, we find causal evidence that paying below a living wage leads to greater turnover but show important variance in this relationship depending upon several firm and location specific factors including monopsony power. Firms that exert control over the local labor supply face less of a penalty for paying low wages. These results are robust to location, industry, firm, and time effects. The costs of paying below living wages appear to be high; a one standard deviation increase in paying below living wages more than doubles employee turnover among workers in low wage job categories, relative to other firms in the same MSA. These results bear implications not only for the cost of paying below living wages for firms, but also wage policies in locations where there are few employers.
Barrymore, Nathan. “Green or Greenwashing? How Manager and Investor Preferences Shape Firm Strategy.“ [SSRN]
When faced with pressures from stakeholders, firms may respond by substantively changing their products and processes, or by symbolically responding without substantive change. In this paper, I theorize and empirically study how managers’ and investors’ preferences with regards to one such pressure – that for environmental and social (ESG) responsibility – causes firms to either make substantive changes that result in improved outcomes or to greenwash: adopt symbolic policies. Empirically, I find that managers’ ESG preferences, as proxied using their language on earnings calls, correlate with both ESG policies and outcomes. However, investors’ ESG preferences correlate with only policies and not outcomes, suggestive of greenwashing. These results are consistent with a principal-agent model in which managers greenwash due to information asymmetry. Finally, I show that my measure of greenwashing correlates with ESG ratings disagreement, providing practical insight for managers and investors. These results have strategic implications in situations in which investors must rely on third party enforcement to verify firms’ claims, as well as for the current effectiveness of investor-led stakeholder capitalism. Furthermore, this paper shows how symbolic management and decoupling can be caused by individual stakeholders’ preferences.
Barrymore, Nathan and Rachelle Sampson. “ESG Performance and Labor Productivity: Exploring whether and when ESG affects firm performance.” [AOM Proceedings]
We explore whether positive ESG (environment, social, and governance) performance causes changes in labor productivity. We use a random coefficient model to estimate the distribution of the ESG-labor productivity relationship across a large sample of US and European firms. The mean effect of ESG performance on labor productivity is statistically significant and positive in some sectors and significant and negative in others, while the variance of the relationship is always larger than the mean effect and statistically and economically significant. We find this variance is greater within than across sectors, suggesting significant firm-level variation in the returns to ESG.
To examine the causal effect of revealing ESG performance, we examine the 2013 UK regulation mandating standardized greenhouse gas emissions reporting. We find that treated firms with better-than-expected ESG performance experienced an increase in labor productivity post-regulation, while treated firms with worse than expected ESG performance saw decreased labor productivity, relative to both pre-treatment trends and a control group. The combination of the correlational and regulatory studies suggests that positive ESG performance positively impacts labor productivity when institutional structures reveal ESG information to stakeholders but has both positive and negative correlations with labor productivity in a population of large firms.