Last week we had the pleasure of having Professor Michela Giorcelli from the University of California – Los Angeles present her work: The Effects of Managerial Education on Manager Career.

Professor Giorcelli's paper studies the effects of business school education on manager career outcomes, using evidence from the Engineering, Science, and Management War Training (ESMWT), that offered MBA-style education to middle managers and production supervisors working at U.S. war industrial facilities during WWII.

Employing a regression discontinuity design (RD), she shows that managers who scored right above the ESWMT entry exam threshold had a substantially higher probability of being promoted to both middle and top management positions during their career and engaged systematically more in self-employment and innovative entrepreneurial activities than similar managers who scored right below. These effects were stronger for nonwhite and female managers. In terms of mechanisms, the increased promotions followed sizable improvements in facility performance, consistent with the idea that the program content mattered, more than with a signalling hypothesis.

Finally, Giorcelli concludes that exposure to a network of classmates from better-performing firms resulted in higher chances of moving into peer companies and founding a business with them.

To learn more about Professor Giorcelli’s work and opinions about the future of the field of Applied Economics we asked her to briefly answer a series of questions. You can find her answer to each of our questions below.

The CC-ME team would like to congratulate Professor Giorcelli for her insightful research and thank her for presenting it in our Seminar Series.

For more information on the upcoming presentations and how to participate in our Seminar Series please visit our dedicated website.