Dear Colleagues,
Our next virtual seminar in the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Policy Research series is Wednesday, May 6 from 11:00-12:00 ET. Nelson Ricardo Laverde Cubillos (Insper) - will present "Leading like Scientists" (with Gabriel Caser dos Passos). Abstract is below. Click the link HERE to register for the April 29nd seminar.
We hope you join us!
- Tim Folta (UCONN), Maryann Feldman (ASU), and Supradeep Dutta (Rutgers U)
Abstract: Decision making under uncertainty poses critical challenges for leaders, who must process ambiguous signals, revise their beliefs, and act under time pressure with incomplete information. We argue that these demands are better met by leaders trained in scientific reasoning, those who habitually define problems, derive testable hypotheses, and update beliefs as evidence accumulates. We capture this logic in a simple analytical model in which scientific training and occupational experience increase the returns to experimentation by improving Bayesian updating: STEM trained leaders design more diagnostic tests, generate higher quality signals, and converge to accurate beliefs more quickly than their non STEM peers, particularly when environmental uncertainty is high. We test the model's implications using the COVID 19 pandemic as a crisis context, exploiting a regression discontinuity design around close mayoral elections in Brazil to compare municipalities narrowly won by STEM trained candidates with those narrowly won by non STEM candidates, approximating quasi random assignment of leadership type. The estimates indicate approximately 36 fewer COVID 19 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants under STEM educated mayors, a substantively large and statistically robust effect stable across alternative bandwidths and specifications. Consistent with the model's predictions, the advantage is strongest among mayors with longer prior experience in STEM occupations, suggesting that formal training alone is insufficient and that sustained scientific practice deepens the cognitive routines driving better decisions, and appears linked to broader and more timely adoption of non pharmaceutical interventions that shape not only what leaders know, but how they learn.
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