What Do Employee Referral Programs Do? Measuring the Direct and Overall Effects of a Management Practice

We thank Heski Bar-Isaac, Nick Bloom, Tore Ellingsen, Matt Gentzkow, Mark Granovetter, Maria Guadalupe, Michael Kosfeld, Edward Lazear, Rosario Macera, Kathryn Shaw, Chad Syverson, John Van Reenen, Russell Weinstein, and especially Lowell Taylor for their comments and suggestions. We are grateful to the World Management Survey (WMS) and especially Daniela Scur for sharing summary statistics on the prevalence of employee referral programs. We thank the study firm's management and employees for their collaboration. We thank numerous seminar and conference participants for their feedback. We thank Muhammad Azim, Daphn\e Baldassari, Griffin Cai, Julija Mozureviciute, Monika Mozureviciute, Mariana Osegura, Sonja Settele, and Julia Wang for excellent research assistance. Financial support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany's Excellence Strategy (EXC 2126/1– 390838866), Michael Lee-Chin Family Institute, and SSHRC is gratefully acknowledged. The experiment was pre-registered on 11/23/2015 with the AEA RCT registry under ID AEARCTR-0000964. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• data appendix
• randomized controlled trials registry entry

• October 30, 2020
• August 28, 2020