Time: 2:30 PM to 4:00 PM, Friday, March 29

Venue: IB1051

Speaker:

Letian (LT) Zhang

Assistant Professor of Business Administration in the Harvard Business School

Host:

Prof. Peiyuan Li

Assistant Professor of Political Economy at Duke Kunshan University

Speaker’s bio: Letian (LT) Zhang is an assistant professor of business administration in the Harvard Business School. He earned a Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University. Professor Zhang studies cross-country differences and organizational inequality.His papaers have been published on journals including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, American Sociological Review, and American Journal of Sociology.

Abstract: We examine the role of a society’s social trust in shaping its organization’s job design. We use a dataset comprising over 60 million job postings from 28 European Union countries. Our most rigorous analytical models employ bilateral trust measures to predict job design choices, including fixed effects on country, firm, and occupation, as well as relying on an instrumental variable approach. This study underscores the role of social trust in shaping organizational practices.