We study the role of cooperation between workers and managers in facilitating organizational adaptation and growth. Using administrative and survey data from a Colombian quick-service restaurant chain and the staggered rollout of a food delivery platform, we show that stores with more balanced manager-crew gender composition exhibit greater cooperation, broader worker training, and more intensive labor reallocation following platform entry. These stores realize sales gains above 7 percent, compared with 2.3 percent in stores where male managers supervise predominantly female crews. Stores with female managers and predominantly male crews perform equally well, consistent with female managers adopting cooperative management practices.

Using administrative data from a large Colombian retailer and exploiting a manager rotation policy to estimate manager value-added, we study what good managers do and whether their impacts persist after they leave. Good managers increase sales by 12%, reducing stockouts while making inventory leaner, generating larger revenue gains from price changes without increasing the frequency of repricing, and shifting personnel attention toward back-office operations. When they depart, the staffing and inventory improvements persist, but pricing-related gains erode. These patterns reveal a fundamental distinction: some managerial contributions are embedded in organizational structure, while others depend on the manager's ongoing, context-specific judgment.

We study how algorithmic recommendations influence job search behavior and employment outcomes among entry-level job seekers. We conducted a large-scale digital field experiment across seven U.S. metropolitan areas, assigning 1,117 job seekers to a control or one of three treatment groups. The control group had access to a job search platform with the same capabilities as popular job search platforms. One treatment aimed to reduce search frictions by sorting vacancies according to user-stated preferences. Another treatment matched participant skills and traits to the skills required in entry-level occupations, sorting vacancies based on predicted fit. A third arm combined these treatments. The combined treatment increased employment by 7-11 percentage points (a 14-20% gain relative to control) without reducing match quality. Each of the treatments also reduced search effort—participants spent fewer hours searching and submitted fewer applications—while platform engagement rose. These findings indicate that direction and preference-based guidance are complementary mechanisms that jointly enhance matching efficiency, helping job seekers find suitable employment faster without sacrificing match quality.

Appellate courts in the United States affirm lower court decisions in the vast majority of cases. If judges under heavy caseloads rely on this base rate as a decisional heuristic, expanding judicial capacity could improve the quality of appellate review and increase reversal rates. I construct a novel panel dataset combining over 700,000 published opinions from 24 state intermediate appellate courts (1970--2024) with hand-compiled data on legislative court expansions. Using continuous two-way fixed effects and event study estimators, I find no statistically significant effect of court expansions on reversal rates, though the estimates are imprecise and cannot rule out economically meaningful effects. This imprecision reflects the confluence of publication bias in the underlying database, few large expansion events, noisy text-based outcome classification, and unreliable judicial appointment dates. I document these data limitations and argue that the hypothesis remains viable but requires richer administrative data to test convincingly. The dataset and empirical framework developed provide a foundation for future work on judicial capacity and the quality of justice.

Public draft is coming soon!

This paper estimates the IHDI at the state and county levels for 2015 and 2020. The estimates contribute to the empirical evidence since no such calculations exist at this level of disaggregation. Our work confirms regional disparities when the HDI is adjusted for inequality.

We demonstrate how university administrators can use National Student Clearinghouse data to better understand the flows of students to and from their own institutions.