Successful thesis defense for Jinci Liu

On Monday June 8, IIES graduate student Jinci Liu successfully defended her doctoral thesis, “Managers, Workers, and Teams: Essays in Organizational and Labor Economics.”

In her research, Jinci shows that managerial feedback plays a central role in team performance. Using large-scale data, she finds that positive and respectful communication increases productivity and retention, while toxic feedback significantly reduces output and raises turnover. Importantly, constructive but non-toxic criticism does not harm performance, highlighting that tone—rather than criticism itself—drives negative effects.

She further demonstrates that feedback generates spillovers within teams, and documents short-term tradeoffs when workers spend time improving existing work instead of creating new output.

Overall, feedback alone explains a substantial share of differences in manager performance.
Jinci’s work also challenges the benefits of strict specialization. Studying millions of task assignments, she finds that broadly shared responsibilities improve output, quality, and problem-solving by fostering knowledge sharing. Finally, her research shows that political environments influence where skilled workers choose to locate, with implications for regional inequality.

Jinci will next join National University of Singapore as Assistant Professor (after a 2-year postdoc).

Ricardo Perez-Truglia, UCLA Anderson School of Management, kindly acted as opponent.

Read more about Jinci's thesis.