Using rich data on personnel records, work assignments, and performance in a financial institution, we uncover the mechanisms leading to promotion gaps in knowledge teamwork. There is a substantial promotion gap for women in early careers. Analysing over 10,000 investment projects, we find that assignments to project team leaderships (a “promotable” task) are crucial in explaining the gaps in promotions and affect long-term careers. We find causal evidence that male supervisors favour male bankers. A survey among employees indicates that women perceive to be disadvantaged in the assignments of tasks, but they do not differ in aspirations and demand for these roles.

Interdisciplinarity is seen as a desirable aspect of research projects that is often promoted by research institutions. However, our study reveals that interdisciplinary research projects are associated with lower citation counts and worse journal placements. These findings suggest that there is a misalignment between the goals of research institutions and researchers, because researchers need highly ranked publications for their promotions. We study a sample of over 13,000 research articles published in economics journals in 2011 and 2012 and present three novel measures of interdisciplinarity. We conduct a Specification Curve (SC) Analysis, which allows for a transparent discussion of data analytic decisions and the visualization of their impact on effect sizes. Furthermore, we find that conducting interdisciplinary research is not a high-risk, high-reward endeavor, but instead: that citation counts to interdisciplinary articles do not keep pace with those of non-interdisciplinary articles over time. Our results are not due to a false classification of cross-disciplinary articles as having low interdisciplinarity, as shown by a robustness exercise in which we include business articles. The results of this study may be used to better align researcher and institutional goals.

Using detailed historical panel data from 19th century Baden, an autonomous state in Germany, we investigate private public-good provision on the municipality level. The development of voluntary fire brigades, a powerful and widespread organizational system of fire protection, offers a unique opportunity to study the development of organizations and understand the determinants of municipality-level capacity to self-organize. Results show the importance of experiencing a large fire and pre-existing social capital in the form of gymnastics and singing clubs. Especially, the interaction between fire and social capital is important, suggesting that the organizational capacity in municipalities needs an initial spark to unfold its effects. The results are robust against the inclusion of municipality time-invariant effects and many other municipality characteristics.