We examine the effects of the big five personalities of CEOs (openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism) on their annual compensation. We hand-collect the tweets of S&P 1500 CEOs and use IBM's Watson Personality Insights to measure their personalities. CEOs with high ratings of agreeableness and conscientiousness get more compensation. We further find that the firms with these CEOs outperform their peers due to better investment efficiency. Firms are willing to pay higher compensation for talent, especially for firms with better operations, located in states with higher labor unionization, or facing higher competition in the product market. Overall, CEO personality is a valid predictor of CEOs' compensation.

This field experiment investigates the causal impact of mothers’ perceptions of gender norms on their employment attitudes and labor-supply expectations. We provide mothers of young children in Germany with information about the prevailing gender norm regarding maternal employment in their city. At baseline, over 70% of mothers incorrectly perceive this gender norm as too conservative. Our randomized treatment improves the accuracy of these perceptions, significantly reducing the share of mothers who misperceive gender norms as overly conservative. The treatment also shifts mothers’ own labor-market attitudes towards being more liberal – and we show that specifically the shifted attitude is a strong predictor of mothers’ future labor-market participation. Consistently, treated mothers are significantly more likely to plan an increase in their working hours one year ahead.

Our results reveal that higher lending spreads between foreign and home markets redirect real estate backed lending towards foreign markets offering a higher interest rate, which provides evidence for "search for yield" behavior. This re-allocation is found especially for banks with more expertise on the foreign market due to a higher local activity and holds for commercial and residential real estate backed loans. Furthermore, "search for yield" behavior and a resulting increase in foreign real estate backed lending is found when macroprudential regulation is missing or misaligned between a bank’s country of residence and the destination country. When turning to the question of whether the detected search for yield behavior results in more risk, we find that especially better capitalized banks report higher forbearance ratios as they might face less stigma effects compared to low capitalized banks.

This field experiment investigates the causal impact of mothers’ perceptions of gender norms on their employment attitudes and labor-supply expectations. We provide mothers of young children in Germany with information about the prevailing gender norm regarding maternal employment in their city. At baseline, over 70% of mothers incorrectly perceive this gender norm as too conservative. Our randomized treatment improves the accuracy of these perceptions, significantly reducing the share of mothers who misperceive gender norms as overly conservative. The treatment also shifts mothers’ own labor-market attitudes towards being more liberal – and we show that specifically the shifted attitude is a strong predictor of mothers’ future labor-market participation. Consistently, treated mothers are significantly more likely to plan an increase in their working hours one year ahead.

The recent advances in automation technology, robotics in particular, have sparked a heated debate over the future of labor and human society at large. The ongoing process of robotization may engender profound impacts on various segments of the labor market. Given the far-reaching implications of robots, it is thus very important to understand the scale and scope of robot use and characteristics of robot users. However, the main challenge is the limited availability of robot data at the microeconomic level (Raj and Seamans, 2018). Due to the data constraint, the bulk of the existing literature relies on cross-country industry-level data from the International Federation of Robotics (IFR). The lack of micro-level robot data makes it difficult to paint a comprehensive picture of robotization in industrial settings, and perhaps more importantly, to assess how within-industry firm level heterogeneity manifests itself in robot use and adoption.