The Trade-Offs of Letting Local Managers Make Hiring Decisions

The authors thank Edward Lazear, Kathryn Shaw, Kate Casey, Adina Sterling, Paul Oyer, and Ran Abramitzky for their encouragement and advice. The authors also thank Jon Atwell, Bill Barnett, Dave Baron, Nick Bloom, Steve Callander, Glenn Carroll, Dave Chan, Thomas Choate, Julien Clement, Dana Foarta, Alberto Galasso, Joshua Gans, Caroline Hoxby, Amir Goldberg, Saumitra Jha, Wenhao Li, Yucheng Liang, Dan Luo, Greg Martin, Alex Oettl, Petra Persson, Luigi Pistaferri, Aruna Ranganathan, Ken Shotts, Jesper Sorensen, Isaac Sorkin, Shiya Wang, Huayu Xu, and David Yilin Yang for the detailed comments. The authors thank the chairmen and departments of human resource, operations, and information technology from the two studied companies for data, advice, and logistical support. The authors are grateful to the World Management Survey (WMS) and especially to Daniela Scur and Thomaz Teodorovicz for sharing their data, which the authors used to report the patterns of delegation in hiring practice. The authors acknowledge financial support from the Stanford King Center on Global Development, the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation, the Stanford Center at Peking University, and the Ronald I. McKinnon Memorial Fellowship.