Research

Publications

Un-Nudging Pay Gaps: The Role of Pay Raise Budget Framing

With Karl Schuhmacher and Kristy Towry. 2025. The Accounting Review 101 (2): 281-311.

Pay gaps, like gender or racial gaps, violate the widely held belief that employees should receive equal pay for equal work. This study examines whether a common control choice – framing pay raise budgets in percentages – contributes to perpetuating pay gaps. We predict that when the pay raise budget is framed as a percentage (the percentage frame), it inadvertently nudges managers to anchor individual raises on that budget percentage, thereby impounding prior salaries, and thus, existing inequities, into pay raises. We further predict that framing the pay raise budget as an absolute amount (the dollar frame) can un-nudge this behavior. As expected, we find in two experiments that the dollar frame perpetuates pay gaps less than the percentage frame, and that this difference is robust to varying levels of ambiguity about the source of salary differences. Our study examines a simple, cost-effective way to limit the perpetuation of pay gaps.

Strategic Alignment, Performance, and the Moderating Effect of Regulatory Fit

With Steve Smith and Travis Steadman. 2025. Journal of Management Accounting Research 37 (1): 111-126.

We examine how the alignment of performance measurement and strategy affects performance on a multidimensional task. Our experiment varies both the strategy (speed versus accuracy) of the hypothetical firm for which participants work and the individual performance measure that is reported to them, creating two conditions of clear alignment and two of clear misalignment. We find that although workers are responsive to the performance measure regardless of its alignment, they are also sensitive to the strategy such that costly alignment effects are observed. We also predict and find that workers respond asymmetrically to misalignment in accuracy performance but not in speed performance, demonstrating that the effects of misaligned performance measurement depend on the fit between firm strategy and the nature of the task being performed.

Working Papers

Timing is Everything: Congruence, Controllability, and Performance Measure Weighting

With Gary Hecht, Bill Tayler, and Kristy Towry. Revising for resubmission to The Accounting Review.

Labor Market Competition and Measure Weighting in Job Promotion Decisions

Solo authored.

Incentives Across Neurotypes: Autism and the Effectiveness of Performance-Based Contracts

With Mackenzie Feinberg, Karen Sedatole, Mikle South, and Kristy Towry.

Research in Progress

• "Mixed Incentives" with Mackenzie Feinberg. Analyzing data.

• "Experimental Participants" with Myrna Modolon Lima and Christian Peters. Collecting data.

• "Human Capital Accounting" with Myrna Modolon Lima and Karen Sedatole. Preparing for data collection.

• "Assessing Potential" with Eric Chan, Cindi Teasley, and Huaxiang Yin. Preparing for data collection.

• "Status and Promotions" with Kyle Broderick. Preparing for data collection.