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Eine Million Euro Steuergeld für jeden JobReint GroppDer Spiegel, 18. Mai 2026
This study examines why people engage in unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB) by focusing on an overlooked mechanism: the mere fact of being a subordinate at the workplace. To establish a causal relationship, we conducted an online experiment with 615 full-time employees. We primed participants with private versus work-related contexts before instructing them to follow a rule that was beneficial for the organization but potentially unethical. We find that individuals high in power distance orientation engage to a greater extent in UPB after being primed on their work-related identity. Our results further emphasize that empowering leadership can mitigate this effect: For participants high in power distance, empowering messages eliminated the priming effect; their UPB levels matched those in the private control group. Thus, our study makes three key contributions: First, we add to the discussion of UPB antecedents. Second, we identify organizations that may be particularly vulnerable. Third, we point to strategies that could reduce UPB.
We study the procurement patterns of non-listed firms and examine how these often-overlooked, yet pivotal players in global supply chains adjust their sourcing when they anticipate accountability for externalities beyond their organizational boundaries. Using granular customs data and a surprise information release about the German Supply Chain Due Diligence Act, product-level regressions reveal that importing firms are 3.5 percentage points less likely to source a product from countries where the relevant production sector exhibits elevated ESG-related risks, suggesting that firms tend to cut ties with higher-risk suppliers. The effects are concentrated among firms with well-diversified supplier networks for a product and higher profitability, suggesting they have the necessary flexibility to respond quickly to anticipated regulatory pressure. Our findings suggest that mandates requiring firms to incorporate broad sustainability considerations into their operational decisions may have limits, particularly for non-listed firms.
We study the impact of stricter and more harmonized banking regulation along the income distribution using household survey data for 25 EU countries. Exploiting country-level heterogeneity in the implementation of European Banking Union directives allows us to control for confounders and identify effects. Our results show that these regulatory reforms aimed at increasing financial system resilience affect households heterogeneously and result in a widening of the income distribution. These results are dependent on a country’s ex-ante regulatory stringency, and more pronounced in countries with stronger bank dependence. Furthermore, we find that more stringent regulation reduces income growth for low-income households primarily due to exits from employment, whereas affluent households tend to experience increased growth rates for employee and self-employed income.
This paper examines how initial public offerings (IPOs) affect firms' internal organization. We find that IPO firms become more hierarchical and standardized organizations, characterized by additional layers, more managers, smaller control spans, and larger administrative functions. These changes occur mostly in preparation for the IPO and can be only partially explained by growth. IPO firms with greater human capital risk experience larger hierarchical changes. Hierarchical changes help firms standardize employee roles and formalize internal processes. Our results suggest that firms reorganize to reduce their dependence on key individuals' human capital when transitioning to public markets.
We examine the survival prospects, employment profiles, and patient outcomes at private equity (PE)-acquired hospitals. Target hospitals maintain their survival rates while significantly reducing employment and wage expenditures. The number of core medical workers drops temporarily, but returns to its pre-acquisition level in the long run. However, administrative job and wage cuts persist over the long term, particularly at previously nonprofit hospitals. Using proprietary insurance claims data, we find no significant changes in patient demographics or inpatient prices at PE-acquired hospitals. While patient satisfaction declines, there is no evidence of increased patient mortality or readmission rates at PE-acquired hospitals.
We provide evidence for a psychological component of inflation concerns. Higher inflation concerns relate in a positive and significant way to respondents’ reported levels of concerns about their financial situation. Results hold when controlling for income and financial constraints.
We study the corporate-loan pricing decisions of a major, systemic bank during the Greek financial crisis. A unique aspect of our data set is that we observe both the actual interest rate and the “break-even rate” (BE rate) of each loan, as computed by the bank’s own loan-pricing department (in effect, the loan’s marginal cost). We document that low-BE-rate (safer) borrowers are charged significant markups, whereas high-BE-rate (riskier) borrowers are charged smaller and even negative markups. We rationalize this de facto cross-subsidization through the lens of a dynamic model featuring depressed collateral values, impaired capital-market access, and limit pricing.
We measure desired labour supply at the extensive (employment) margin in two representative surveys of the U.S. and German populations. We elicit reservation raises: the percent wage change that renders a given individual indifferent between employment and nonemployment. It is equal to her reservation wage divided by her actual, or potential, wage. The reservation raise distribution is the nonparametric aggregate labour supply curve. Locally, the curve exhibits large short-run elasticities above 3, consistent with business cycle evidence. For larger upward shifts, arc elasticities shrink towards 0.5, consistent with quasi-experimental evidence from tax holidays. Existing models fail to match this nonconstant, asymmetric curve.
The chief human resource officer (CHRO) role elevates people-related matters to the apex of the firm. Why do some companies’ leading management teams place so much emphasis on human resources while others do not? The present study argues that CHROs’ presence in the C-suite is driven by firms’ imitation of industry peers’ leadership structures as a response to uncertainty. The investigation also sheds light on the moderating role of environmental factors that can influence mimetic isomorphism in HR leadership. Through a longitudinal analysis of large listed firms between 2006 and 2020, the study shows a positive relationship between the prevalence of the CHRO position among firms’ peers and a focal firm having a CHRO in its top management. The results demonstrate that certain types of uncertainty serve as boundary conditions for such copying actions: Industry growth strengthens mimicking behavior while industry dynamism weakens it. There is no clear evidence for the moderating role of industry competition. The findings contribute a neo-institutional view of human resource structures in the top management and strengthen the bond between the strategy and human resource literature.
