Seminars

Abstract: Employees may compete not just on work effort but along dimensions unrelated to their job requirements or performance evaluation criteria. We investigate whether such informal or implicit competition matters for young workers’ careers, focusing on the case of paternity leave. Detecting the competition effect in observational data is not straightforward: workers who have the least to lose from it may disproportionately select into leave. Moreover, leave-taking may be most common in workplaces in which competition matters the least. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel strategy in which we exogenously vary the focal worker’s ranking in a contest, not via his own leave status but that of his competitors, exploiting a policy reform. We provide evidence consistent with the existence of the competition effect. Our findings have important implications for a variety of public and workplace policies including normalization of remote work and mandated leave benefits. 



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