Jordi Blanes i Vidal

When Should Leaders Share Information with their Subordinates

We show that when leaders share some of their information with subordinates, decision making is subject to a motivational bias; leaders make the decisions their subordinates want to see. As this bias increases with the quality of the shared information, an improvement of an organizations information might even decrease its efficiency. As a consequence, information sharing is not always optimal. We show however that self-confidence can help the leader to overcome his motivational bias, thus making information sharing more attractive. Conversely, we find that information sharing can help to curb the autocratic tendencies of a self-confident leadership. We conclude that a policy of information sharing and the appointment of a self-confident leadership are most effective when they go hand in hand.

Project selection and execution in teams

We use a mechanism-design approach to study a team whose members select a joint project and exert individual efforts to execute it. Members have private information about the qualities of alternative projects. Information sharing is obstructed by a trade-off between adaptation and motivation. We determine the conditions under which first-best project and effort choices are implementable and show that these conditions can become relaxed as the team grows in size. We also characterize the second-best mechanism and find that it may include a “motivational bias,” that is, a bias in favor of the teams initially preferred project, and higher-than-optimal effort by uninformed team members.

Face-to-Face Communication in Organisations

Communication is integral to organisations and yet field evidence on the relation between communication and worker productivity remains scarce. We argue that a core role of communication is to transmit information that helps co-workers do their job better. We build a simple model in which workers choose the amount of communication by trading off this benefit against the time cost incurred by the sender, and use it to derive a set of empirical predictions. We then exploit a natural experiment in an organisation where problems arrive and must be sequentially dealt with by two workers. For exogenous reasons, the first worker can sometimes communicate face- to-face with their colleague. Consistently with the predictions of our model we find that: (a) the second worker works faster (at the cost of the first worker having less time to deal with incoming problems) when face-to-face communication is possible, (b) this effect is stronger when the second worker is busier and for homogenous and closely-located teams, and (c) the (career) incentives of workers determine how much they communicate with their colleagues. We also find that workers partially internalise social outcomes in their communication decisions. Our findings illustrate how workers in teams adjust the amount of mutual communication to its costs and benefits.

Domestic Abuse: What Do We Know About it?

In this paper we are trying to give an overview of patterns and determinants of Domestic Abuse, and influencing factors like weather, football, and a variety of other temporal and spatial dimensions. We find that temporally domestic abuse is higher from Friday to Sunday, and that certain events increase the number of domestic abuses such as New Year’s Eve or Football. The weather plays an important influencing factor, with high temperatures being related with higher quantities of domestic abuse cases, while rain decreases it. Football increases domestic abuse in total, but also for groups higher up the social strata. We also observe the effect of socio-economic factors such as income, race, religion and education and see how each one affects differently the domestic abuses.

The Effect of Police Response Time on Crime Detection

Police agencies devote vast resources to minimising the time that it takes them to attend the scene of a crime. Despite this, the long-standing consensus is that police response time has no meaningful effect on the likelihood of catching offenders. We revisit this question using a uniquely rich dataset from the Greater Manchester Police. To identify causal effects, we exploit discontinuities in distance to the response station across locations next to each other, but on different sides of division boundaries. Contrary to previous evidence, we find large and strongly significant effects: in our preferred estimate, a 10% increase in response time leads to a 4.6 percentage points decrease in the likelihood of detection. A faster response time also decreases the number of days that it takes for the police to detect a crime, conditional on eventual detection. We find stronger effects for thefts than for violent offenses, although the effects are large for every type of crime. We identify the higher likelihood that a suspect will be named by a victim or witness as an important mechanism though which response time makes a difference.