We use a quasi-experimental research design to study the introduction of a relative performance evaluation without introducing relative performance pay. The setting is a firm in which workers are paid piece rates and where, at some point, management begins to reveal to workers their relative position in the distribution of pay and productivity. We find that merely providing this information leads to a large and permanent increase in productivity that is costless to the firm. Our findings are consistent with the interpretation that workers' incipient concerns about their relative standing are activated by information about how they are performing relative to others.

Washington's `revolving door' -the movement from government service into the lobbying industry-is regarded as a major concern for policy-making. We study how ex-government staffers benefit from the personal connections acquired during their public service. Lobbyists with experience in the office of a US Senator suffer a 24% drop in generated revenue when that Senator leaves office. The effect is immediate, discontinuous around the exit period and long-lasting. Consistent with the notion that lobbyists sell access to powerful politicians, the drop in revenue is increasing in the seniority of and committee assignments power held by the exiting politician.

We study how ex-government officials benefit from the personal connections acquired during public service. Lobbyists with experience in the office of a US Senator suffer a 24% drop in generated revenue when that Senator leaves office. The effect is immediate, discontinuous around the exit period, and long-lasting. Consistent with the notion that lobbyists sell access to powerful politicians, the drop in revenue is increasing in the committee assignments power held by the exiting politician.Keywords: Lobbying, Revolving Door, US Congress, Political Connections, Political Elites.JEL Classification: H11, J24, J45. * We thank Nick Bloom, Andy Eggers, Steve Machin, Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, Yona Rubinstein, Ken Shepsle and James Snyder for insightful comments. We also thank participants at various conferences and seminars where we presented various versions of this work. We are grateful to the Centre for Responsive Politics, Columbia Books and LegiStorm for answering our questions regarding the data used in this paper. The Center for Economic Performance provided generous funding. We thank Johannes Schmieder for sharing STATA code with us. Victoria Loidl, Vithal Mittal and Jagveer Singh Kang provided excellent research assistance. All errors remain our own.

Communication is integral to organisations and yet field evidence on the relation between communication and worker productivity remains scarce. We argue that a core role of communication is to transmit information that helps co-workers do their job better. We build a simple model in which workers choose the amount of communication by trading off this benefit against the time cost incurred by the sender, and use it to derive a set of empirical predictions. We then exploit a natural experiment in an organisation where problems arrive and must be sequentially dealt with by two workers. For exogenous reasons, the first worker can sometimes communicate face-to-face with their colleague. Consistently with the predictions of our model we find that: (a) the second worker works faster (at the cost of the first worker having less time to deal with incoming problems) when face-to-face communication is possible, (b) this effect is stronger when the second worker is busier and for homogenous and closely-located teams, and (c) the (career) incentives of workers determine how much they communicate with their colleagues. We also find that workers partially internalise social outcomes in their communication decisions. Our findings illustrate how workers in teams adjust the amount of mutual communication to its costs and benefits.

We show that when leaders share some of their information with subordinates, decision making is subject to a motivational bias; leaders make the decisions their subordinates want to see. As this bias increases with the quality of the shared information, an improvement of an organization's information might even decrease its efficiency. As a consequence, information sharing is not always optimal. We show however that self-confidence can help the leader to overcome his motivational bias, thus making information sharing more attractive. Conversely, we find that information sharing can help to curb the autocratic tendencies of a self-confident leadership. We conclude that a policy of information sharing and the appointment of a self-confident leadership are most effective when they go hand in hand. (1997, p. 193) states that "no matter how brilliant the strategy may be, We thank Ottaviani and participants at various seminars and conferences for valuable suggestions. We are especially grateful to Michele Piccione and Andrea Prat for their guidance and support.

Police agencies devote vast resources to minimising the time that it takes them to attend the scene of a crime. Despite this, the long-standing consensus is that police response time has no meaningful effect on the likelihood of catching offenders. We revisit this question using a uniquely rich dataset from the Greater Manchester Police. To identify causal effects, we use a novel strategy that exploits discontinuities in distance to the response station across locations next to each other, but on different sides of division boundaries. Contrary to previous evidence, we find large and strongly significant effects: in our preferred estimate, a 10% increase in response time leads to a 4.7 percentage points decrease in the likelihood of clearing the crime. We find stronger effects for thefts than for violent offenses, although the effects are large for every type of crime. We find suggestive evidence in support of two mechanisms: the likelihood of an immediate arrest and the likelihood that a suspect will be named by a victim or witness both increase as response time becomes faster. We argue that, under conservative assumptions, hiring an additional response officer would generate a benefit, in terms of future crime prevented, equivalent to 170% of her payroll cost. JEL classification: D29, K40. * This paper was previously circulated with the title 'The Effect of Police Response Time on Crime Detection'. We thank Yona Rubinstein for his support and invaluable insights throughout this project. Juliane Thieme typed it, edited it, simplified and occasionally embellished the language. We also thank

We use a quasi-experimental research design to study the introduction of a relative performance evaluation without introducing relative performance pay. The setting is a firm in which workers are paid piece rates and where, at some point, management begins to reveal to workers their relative position in the distribution of pay and productivity. We find that merely providing this information leads to a large and permanent increase in productivity that is costless to the firm. Our findings are consistent with the interpretation that workers' incipient concerns about their relative standing are activated by information about how they are performing relative to others.

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