| This thesis examines three topics. The first chapter, entitled "Socializing at Work: Evidence from a Field Experiment with Manufacturing Workers" examines how working alongside friends affects employee productivity and how this effect is heterogeneous with respect to an employee's non-cognitive skills. I designed and implemented a field experiment at a seafood-processing plant in Vietnam in which, each day, workers were randomly assigned to work stations within the processing room. This generated exogenous variation in their proximity to their friends: sometimes, but not always, a worker's friend was assigned to work right next to her. This paper presents two main findings. First, worker productivity, as measured by the weight of seafood processed per hour, declines when a friend is close enough to socialize with. Combining the experimental results with pre-experiment data, I find that when workers chose their own work stations, they incurred a wage loss of three percent due to socializing; their wage is a function of their output and they earn less when working alongside friends. Second, based on assessments of workers' Big Five personality factors administered prior to the experiment, I show that workers who are higher on the conscientiousness scale show smaller declines in productivity when working alongside a friend and were also less likely to be found working alongside a friend prior to the experiment. Socializing behaviors account for two-thirds of the 7 percent productivity gap observed between high- and low-conscientiousness workers.;The second chapter, entitled "Input Misallocation and Production Externalities" examines how the ability of coworkers affects individual productivity. I study a seafood-processing plant in rural Vietnam, where workers process fish individually and are compensated based on own output. Input (steamed fish) is allocated by worktable, which on average consists of four workers, and is restocked throughout the day based on each table's performance; therefore, input is a common resource yet renewable. For a period of five months, workers were randomly assigned to worktables on a daily basis. Using random variation in coworker composition, I find that an increase in coworker ability leads to a decrease in worker productivity, measured as kilograms of fish processed per hour. I show both theoretically and empirically that the effect captures production externalities arising from input constraints even when inputs are on average restocked to match the table's work speed.;The third chapter, entitled ''Gender Peer Effects: Evidence from a Quasi-Random Classroom Allocation Policy" investigates the effects of exposure to opposite gender peers on academic performance. The literature on gender peer effects documents that exposure to opposite gender peers can lead to higher academic performances for boys but lower outcomes, especially in math, for girls. This result can be explained by two distinct exposure effects. One is inside-class time exposure (e.g. boy peers are disruptive and lower the quality of student-teacher interactions) and the other is outside-class time exposure effects that arise through social interactions with peers outside class periods. I use student-level data from a Korean high school that, at the beginning of each academic year, quasi-randomly assigned students to either a single-sex or a coeducational homeroom. Students assigned to the same homeroom have the same class schedule and take classes together in their homeroom --- except for tracking subjects, math and English, where students are assigned to separate classrooms based on gender and academic skill in each subject. Therefore, students in coeducational homerooms learn some subjects (e.g. Korean) with opposite gender peers, but learn math and English only with same-sex peers. To address concerns with multiple inference, I use false discovery rate corrections throughout the empirical analysis. This paper presents two main findings. First, I find no significant effect of assignment to a coeducational classroom on boys' and girls' academic achievements in math and English. Second, I find significant increases in girls' Korean test scores when assigned to a coeducational classroom and if a girl's prior performance in Korean was above her cohort's average performance. These findings suggest that gender peer effects are mostly driven by exposure to opposite gender peers during class periods and that the presence of boy peers can positively influence girls' performances in subjects that are stereotyped in favor of girls. |
