Tiantian Yang Archives

Blessing or Curse? The Impact of Spousal Teams on Startup Hiring: Evidence from Observational Data and a Field Experiment

Gender disparities persist in entrepreneurship, with women facing significant challenges in founding and growing ventures (Gompers et al., 2021; Rocha and van Praag, 2020). Women represent just 20% of founders in the U.S. (Guzman and Kacperczyk, 2019) and tend to underperform relative to men (Ruef et al., 2003; Kim et al., 2006). Prior research attributes this gap to systemic barriers, such as educational and institutional constraints (“leaky pipeline”), and evaluative biases from investors and gatekeepers…Read More

Premium or Penalty? Differential Effects of Gender and Race on Internal Promotions to Top-Management Positions

Our groundbreaking research explores the evolving landscape of leadership diversity in top management. Despite the pressure on organizations to improve diversity, empirical evidence remains mixed. Our study uniquely examines the disparities in promotion outcomes for women and racial minorities, leveraging a vast dataset of approximately 100 million online job profiles from 7,000 large U.S. firms (2014-2023). We propose a new theory combining institutional and categorical inequality perspectives to explain why gender diversity has progressed more than racial diversity in top management. This research provides critical insights into the conditions that foster effective diversity initiatives in senior corporate roles.…Read More

Cash or Equity? Employees’ Compensation and the Gender of the Startup Founder

We extend recent studies on how gender shapes subordinate-supervisor interactions by documenting that employees may, under some conditions, negatively stereotype female supervisors in ways that make them more risk averse when choosing the form of compensation. we use employer-employee matched data from Sweden for the period 1991-2021 to assess whether an employee’s chosen compensation in the form of equity (at a given pay) varies with its founder’s gender.…Read More

Minority Entrepreneurship and Alternative Opportunities inside Established Organizations

Research has primarily focused on independently owned ventures, but individuals can also engage in startup activities via intrapreneurship—by launching and operating new ventures inside established organizations. We propose that these internal routes of new-venture formation offer a more inclusive pathway for racial minorities than external routes.…Read More

How Do Job Candidates’ Salary Expectations Affect Firms’ Hiring Evaluations?

Firms often ask workers to indicate their salary expectations when they are applying for jobs. But, we currently have a limited understanding on how these salary expectations affect firms’ evaluation of the candidate: do firms evaluate candidates with low or high salary expectations more favorably? The goal of this research is to enrich our understanding of the labor market by elucidating the relationship between workers’ salary expectations and hiring evaluations.…Read More