Research

In the Personnel & Leadership Group, we seek to understand and improve how people learn, lead, and succeed at work. Our research connects insights from economics, management, and psychology to address real-world challenges in organizations and education. 

Group members hold extensive expertise in quantitative methods, including laboratory and field experiments, organizational field studies, and archival analyses. They also apply microeconomic approaches to examine decision-making and quantify the effects of interventions, incentives, and policies. Qualitative methodologies, such as semi-structured interviews analyzed through grounded theory, complement this work. Taken together, these approaches allow the group to identify causal relationships and provide robust insights into how individuals and organizations operate in real-world contexts. 

Beyond publishing in leading academic journals in our respective fields, Leadership & Personnel Management group members communicate about our research in top practitioner-oriented outlets such as the Harvard Business Review and our research receives coverage in popular press outlets such as Forbes, The BBC, The Atlantic, The Economist, The New York Times, and more. 

The Personnel & Leadership Group hosts two research centers:  

1. The Swiss Leading House VPET-ECON, a research center on the economics of education, firm behavior and training policies. We share our research on education, personnel and innovation economics through leading international peer-reviewed journals such as Industrial Relations, Research Policy, or PNAS Nexus, and practice-oriented journals in local languages such as Die Volkswirtschaft and Perspektiven der Wirtschaftspolitik.  
2. The Center for Leadership in the Future of Work, a research center on how people can thrive at work both today and tomorrow. Our research spans topics from leadership, emotional intelligence, mindsets, and social dynamics.