Job Market Paper

I investigate the rate at which retail frontline managers access different types of detailed data underlying top-level key performance indicators (“drilldown data”). I find results consistent with frontline managers accessing drilldown data to support their performance on related operational decisions and to achieve weekly performance targets. However, accessing drilldown data is not a sufficient condition for better decisions and higher performance, and a variety of factors, especially supervisors’ KPI-driven monitoring, influence FLMs’ drilldown access rates.

Links: Video Summary

With Carolyn Deller and Shawn Kim. 

Practitioner experts claim that the use of internal carbon pricing (ICP), a novel management control that factors a cost of emissions into investment and/or operational decisions, can address firms’ struggles to translate ambitious emissions targets into everyday investment and operational decisions. We predict and find that emissions target substantiveness and ICP are complementary management controls.

Links: SSRN

With Pablo Casas-Arce and Asís Martínez-Jerez. 

Using a field experiment at a large retail chain, we provide evidence that managers' leadership styles moderate the effectiveness of different types of incentives. Store managers using the servant leadership style are more able to leverage non-fungible team incentives, such as a store outing, than non-servant leader managers.

Review of Accounting Studies 30 (2): 1099-1136

With Pablo Casas-Arce and Asís Martínez-Jerez. 

We study the motivational effects of top managers' visits to front-line employees through a field experiment. Our results indicate that managing by walking around can provide workers positive motivation, separate from the monitoring and learning effects of managerial field visits previously identified in the literature.

Links: SSRN | Publisher | Video Summary

Media Coverage: Forbes