The RFBerlin Brown Bag Seminar is an informal lunchtime meet up where researchers and students present ongoing work and new ideas in a relaxed, discussion-oriented setting. Rooted in the tradition of bringing one’s own lunch in a paper-brown bag, it offers space for open exchange and constructive feedback.

This week, we welcome Diego Battiston a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Economics and RFBerlin Affiliate.
His research focuses on Labor and Organisational Economics, investigating how incentives and social interactions shape behaviour in organisations and labor markets. Recent work has examined how face-to-face communication affects worker productivity, talent poaching, the impact of social interactions on economic outcomes, and how financial advisors’ incentives influence client investments.

Event Topic:

The Productivity of Employees and Contractors: Evidence from the Emergency Department

Firms often use external contractors to fill key roles, yet little is known about their productivity. We compare permanent and contracted doctors in the Emergency Department of a large public hospital. Both perform identical tasks, and patients are quasi-randomly assigned, enabling causal identification. Contracted doctors take at least 27% longer to treat and discharge patients and spend at least 8% more on tests and treatments, yet achieve no detectably better patient outcomes. These gaps largely reflect the causal effect of contractor status rather than selection into that status. We uncover an important mechanism: employees are willing to exert extra effort on behalf of their fellow employees, but not on behalf of contractors.

Event Details:

Participation in the seminar is limited to RFBerlin members and researchers from affiliated institutions. External researchers who are interested in attending are kindly asked to contact the events manager Yulia Aster at [email protected]