Research

Rising temperatures are increasingly recognized as a threat to worker safety, yet little is known about how organizational practices shape firms' vulnerability to temperature-induced workplace injuries. This paper studies whether pay dispersion within establishments conditions the impact of heat on work-related accidents. Using establishment-day data on formal manufacturing establishments in Brazil, we exploit plausibly exogenous day-to-day temperature variation within establishment–month–year cells to estimate the effect of heat on workplace injuries. Higher temperatures significantly increase workplace accidents, and this effect is substantially larger in establishments with greater wage dispersion. The findings are consistent with organizational mechanisms through which unequal pay structures intensify stress, competition, or risk-taking, reducing workers' ability to adapt safely to heat exposure. The results highlight pay dispersion as an important determinant of climate-related labor risks and underscore the role of organizational design in shaping the safety consequences of rising temperatures.

This paper examines the strategies and long-term outcomes of for-profit and non-profit firms when entering markets for public services by employing data from private higher education in Brazil. Using quantitative analysis and qualitative interviews, it finds that, when compared to non-profits, for-profit firms adopted different strategies at entry, with broader service portfolios, more market-oriented offerings, and more flexible human resource management policies. These distinct elements accounted for a significant share of the superior long-term survival and scale achieved by for-profit firms, and without consequences for the quality of services provided. The stronger social mission of a subset of non-profits partially explains these disparities. The findings underscore how for-profits can play a role in expanding access to public services, thus offsetting constraints faced by non-profits.

While health systems around the world increasingly consolidate services into fewer hospitals, potentially improving care quality by reallocating patients to better-resourced facilities, such changes can also increase travel distances and hinder access to care. This paper studies the impacts of public hospital closures on delivery care in Brazil, a middle-income country with persistently high maternal and infant mortality and exceptionally high C-section rates. Using administrative birth and hospitalization records from 2007 to 2019 and a difference-in-differences design, we show that closures shift deliveries toward larger, better-equipped hospitals and reduce C-section rates, but yield no meaningful improvements in maternal or newborn health. Instead, we observe slight declines in birthweights and increases in preterm births, along with substantial heterogeneity in impacts across local demographics. Moreover, we find no evidence of improved treatment efficiency: post-closure C-section decisions are not better targeted to clinically recommended cases and appear largely driven by hospital-level practices, as shown using a “movers” design. Using a structural model of hospital demand, we show that closures reduce patient welfare and provide cost-utility estimates for alternative staffing policies that could mitigate their negative effects.

Organizations often struggle to deploy specialized expertise where it creates the most value. We argue that specialized roles help address this challenge by codifying expertise into formal positions that function as allocative infrastructure, channeling work to appropriate professionals. We test this argument in Brazilian maternity wards that introduced a new specialized nursing role. Using data on more than 15 million births and a difference-in-differences design, we show that the introduction of this role is associated with improved matching between expertise and client needs. These effects are stronger when client demand is higher, workflows are more predictable, and organizational experience is greater. A simulation analysis indicates that these improvements go beyond compositional changes, reflecting the system's enhanced ability to route patients to appropriate providers. Improved matching is also linked to better maternal and newborn outcomes. Together, our findings extend research on task allocation by theorizing roles as allocative infrastructure and identifying organizational conditions under which specialization improves matching in professional work.

Peer influence is crucial in shaping work practices within organizations, yet the impact of formal organizational structures on this influence remains underexplored. We argue that task structures, which capture how tasks are allocated and configured within organizations, significantly affect peer interactions and influence. Specifically, we examine how two features of task structures—task variety and task similarity with peers—moderate peer influence in a highly consequential setting: physicians' decisions to perform a birth via caesarean section (C-section) versus vaginal delivery. Using data on nearly 5 million births performed by more than 16,500 physicians across 915 hospitals in Brazil, we find that working alongside peers whose practice style (enduring preference) favors C-sections leads the focal physician to perform more C-sections, even after controlling for features of the mother and the pregnancy. This influence is significantly stronger for physicians with higher task variety and with higher task similarity with peers. Through post-hoc analyses, we provide evidence that the observed behaviors are consistent with a mechanism of information sharing between physicians. This study contributes to our understanding of peer influence in the workplace by showing how the task structure within organizations can either amplify or diminish peer influence. This awareness is particularly crucial for health care organizations in which such dynamics can have life-changing consequences.

Scarcity of productive factors poses a challenge for firms entering underdeveloped regions. We theorize that incumbent firms can overcome scarcity of skilled human capital in local labor markets by redeploying workers from existing units. We predict that redeployment is more valuable when factor markets exhibit large differences in resource scarcity. Redeployment is also more valuable when output is highly sensitive to worker skill and is responsive to complementarities between labor and other inputs. Important implications are that redeployment can endow firms with superior resources and enable them to enter more markets. Data on sugar mills in Brazil, where a sudden demand boom incentivized expansion, corroborate the predictions. Our research identifies a new mechanism of value-creation from resource redeployment across factor markets.

This study develops a dynamic perspective on how elected state officials' political incentives shape the behavior and performance of organizations, particularly state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Drawing on theoretical views about the relationship between politicians and firms, I argue that state officials seeking votes manipulate SOEs to boost employment before elections. As a result, SOEs exhibit both higher employment levels and lower financial performance in election years. The positive relationship between elections and SOE employment, however, is not uniform across firms and geographic communities: it is likely to be stronger in economically disadvantaged communities and weaker for SOEs with private investors. Data from Brazil's water sector—an industry managing a crucial societal resource—support these predictions. These results shed light on the mechanisms linking officials' political incentives and SOE behavior and show that SOE performance is politically contingent and thus varies systematically over time. More broadly, this study reveals how firms' responses to political pressures depend on both organizational and community attributes and highlights how the interplay of election cycles, organizations, and communities shapes the performance of organizations in state capitalism.

In many countries, firms face institutional “voids” that raise the costs of doing business and thwart entrepreneurial activity. We examine a particular mechanism that may address those voids: minority state ownership. Minority stakes are less affected by the “agency distortions” commonly found for full-fledged state ownership. Using panel data from publicly traded firms in Brazil, where the government holds minority stakes through its development bank, we find a positive effect of those stakes on firms' returns on assets and on the capital expenditures of financially constrained firms with investment opportunities. However, these positive effects are substantially reduced when minority stakes are allocated to business group affiliates and as local institutions develop. Therefore, we shed light on the firm-level implications of minority state ownership, a topic that has received scant attention in the strategy literature.