Should Human Capital Development Programs be Mandatory or Voluntary? Evidence from a Field Experiment on Mentorship

The authors thank Emily Beam, Jasmijn Bol, Laura Boudreau (discussant), Zoe Cullen, Florian Englmaier (discussant), Guido Friebel, Robert Garlick, Robert Gary-Bobo (discussant), Isaac Hacamo (discussant), Jessica Hoel, Mitch Hoffman, Lisa LaViers, John List, Michelle Lowry, Bentley MacLeod, Robert Metcalfe, Paige Ouimet, Dimitris Papanikolaou, Raffaella Sadun, Elena Simintzi, Jason Snyder, Harish Sujan, Brian Waters (discussant), Michael Weisbach, seminar participants at Harvard Business School, MIT, the University of Michigan’s Ross Strategy Brownbag series, the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, the University of Arizona, and conference participants at the CEPR IMO, the Econometric Society Latin American Meeting, the FMA, the Advances in Field Experiments Meeting, the Accounting and Economics Society, the 2022 Labor and Finance Meeting, the 2022 Strategy Science Conference, the 2022 NBER Summer Institute, the 2022 NBER Organizational Economics Meeting, and the 2023 AEA Annual Meeting for helpful comments.