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. We find a substantial promotion gap for women in early career stages. Analyzing over a decade of personnel and investment project data reveals 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 favor male bankers, while women benefit from female supervisors. 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.

UHow does self-organization emerge? We study the formation of volunteer fire brigades in 19th-century Baden, then a sovereign state in the German lands. Many communities — though far from all — established these brigades, a form of bottom-up collective action that persists to this day. Self-organization emerged where local shocks met pre-existing civic associations: a major fire sharply raised the likelihood of founding a brigade, but only in communities that already had a singing or gymnastics club.