Essays in Behavioral Labor Economics

This dissertation consists of three essays in Behavioral Labor Economics. The first two chapters contribute to the understanding of non-standard preferences of individuals in the workplace, and the third studies how cultural values affect firm behavior. The first chapter studies the incentive effects of top-down favoritism in employee promotions on workers and its organization-wide productivity consequences, and provides evidence on social preferences and fairness concerns among co-workers. Using data from public high schools in four Chinese cities, I first show that teachers with hometown or college ties to the school principal are twice as likely to be promoted, after controlling for characteristics on their application profiles and their value-added in teaching. I then use the results from a survey in which I asked teachers to select anonymous peers to promote from a pool of applicants applying for promotion to infer each teacher’s revealed fairness views regarding promotion qualifications. Contrasting these with actual past promotions in turn allows me to measure if and when a teacher might have observed unfair promotions in her own school in the past. Exposure to unfair promot