Elizabeth Linos

University of California, Berkeley | UCB

There is a human capital crisis looming in the public sector as fewer and fewer people show interest in government jobs. At the same time, many public sector organizations struggle with increasing the diversity of their workforce. Although many institutional forces contribute to the challenge, part of the solution is in how government recruits. Thi...

Over 150,000 low- and moderate-income California high school graduates each year are eligible for CalGrant entitlement awards, which can cover full tuition and most fees at any of the three public higher education segments in the state, or can make substantial contributions toward tuition at private colleges. Unfortunately, many eligible students d...

Organizational scholarship centers on understanding organizational context, usually captured through field studies, as well as determining causality, typically with laboratory experiments. We argue that field experiments can bridge these approaches, bringing causality to field research and developing organizational theory in novel ways. We present...

This paper documents the existence of a ‘formality effect’ in government communications. Across three online studies and three field experiments in different policy contexts (total N = 67,632), we show that, contrary to researcher and practitioner predictions, formal government communications are more effective at influencing resident behaviour tha...

Many low-income households in the United States miss out on social safety net benefits because of the information, compliance, and psychological costs associated with take-up of government assistance. Yet, the empirical evidence on the impact of learning and psychological costs on take-up, and how to reduce them, is mixed. Leaning on an administrat...

The Earned Income Tax Credit distributes more than $60 billion to over 20 million low-income families annually. Nevertheless, an estimated one-fifth of eligible households do not claim it. We ran six preregistered, large-scale field experiments with 1 million observations to test whether “nudges” could increase EITC take-up. Despite varying the con...

Background: Burnout affects >50% of physicians, especially women. This study aimed to examine how negative workplace interactions can predict burnout, and whether positive social interactions can mitigate risk. Materials and Methods: In a study of 1627 physician mothers who responded to a survey by the Physician Moms Group, an online Facebook group...

Public servants’ mental health can impact how, how well, and to whom services are delivered. In this article, we extend the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) framework to consider whether employees’ perceptions of themselves, their co-workers, and beneficiaries predict higher psychological distress during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through a survey of state...

As US college costs continue to rise, governments and institutions have quadrupled financial aid. Yet, the administrative process of receiving financial aid remains complex, raising costs for families and deterring students from enrolling. In two large-scale field experiments ( N = 265,570), we test the impact of nudging high-school seniors in Cali...

Government programs provide a critical safety net for millions of Americans, but their success depends on who accesses benefits. This research examines the role of stigma, an often-cited, but understudied barrier to take-up of safety net programs. Two field experiments (N = 117,073) and three online experiments (N = 1,751) show that the stigma asso...

Nudge interventions have quickly expanded from academic studies to larger implementation in so‐called Nudge Units in governments. This provides an opportunity to compare interventions in research studies, versus at scale. We assemble a unique data set of 126 RCTs covering 23 million individuals, including all trials run by two of the largest Nudge...

Government agencies around the world struggle to retain frontline workers, as high job demands and low job resources contribute to persistently high rates of employee burnout. Although four decades of research have documented the predictors and potential costs of frontline worker burnout, we have limited causal evidence on strategies that reduce it...

Objectives: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has presented extreme challenges for health care workers. This study sought to characterize challenges faced by physician mothers, compare differences in challenges by home and work characteristics, and elicit specific needs and potential solutions. Methods: We conducted a mixed-methods...

The last decade has seen remarkable growth in the field of behavioral public administration, both in practice and in academia. In both domains, applications of behavioral science to policy problems have moved forward at breakneck speed; researchers are increasingly pursuing randomized behavioral interventions in public administration contexts, edit...

Police departments struggle to recruit officers, and voluntary drop‐off of candidates exacerbates this challenge. Using four years of administrative data and a field experiment conducted in the Los Angeles Police Department, the authors analyze the impact of administrative burden on the likelihood that a candidate will remain in the recruitment pro...

In the past decade, public sector organizations around the world have worked to simplify administrative processes as a way to improve user experience and compliance. Academic evidence on administrative burden supports this approach and there is a strong body of research showing that learning costs, compliance costs, and psychological costs help to...

Burnout, an increasingly important challenge in modern workplaces, has been associated with negative health outcomes, high turnover, and poor organization performance. Yet, we have limited causal evidence about how to mitigate its risk. We posit that workers are more susceptible to burnout if they feel undervalued in their roles. Drawing on evidenc...

Police departments are struggling to recruit officers and voluntary drop-off of candidates exacerbates the challenge. Using four years of administrative data and a field experiment in the LAPD, we analyze the impact of administrative burden on the likelihood that a candidate will remain in the recruitment process. We find that reducing friction cos...

In the past decade, public sector organizations around the world have worked to simplify administrative processes as a way to improve user experience and compliance. Academic evidence on administrative burden supports this approach and there is a strong body of research showing that learning costs, compliance costs and psychological costs help to e...

Objectives To report woman physicians’ experiences, in their own words, of discrimination based on their role as a mother. Design Qualitative analysis of physician mothers’ free-text responses to the open question: “We want to hear your story and experience. Please share” included in questions about workplace discrimination. Three analysts iterati...

Increasing diversity is a key challenge that faces our field and medicine in general. A tension is commonly thought to exist between recruiting the best candidates and increasing diversity. Yet, the existence and adverse impacts of implicit biases in recruitment are well established. ⁵ • Rivera L. Hiring as cultural matching: The case of elite pro...

Retaining women in academic medicine is challenging, despite gender parity in medical training. Child-rearing and differential preferences on work-life balance may contribute to sex differences in retention in medicine.¹ Retaining women during childbearing years is central to gender parity, as even short workforce interruptions can have long-term c...

Roughly 20% of adults in the OECD lack basic numeracy and literacy skills. In the UK, many colleges offer fully government subsidized adult education programs to improve these skills. Constructing a unique dataset consisting of weekly attendance records for 1179 students, we find that approximately 25% of learners stop attending these programs in t...

How do national social programs influence local voting? This study utilizes the experimental set up of a conditional cash transfer program to show that small, targeted cash transfers can have large electoral effects. The Honduran PRAF program allocated an average of $18 per capita per year to poor households within municipalities that were randomly...

Eleni Linos, Elizabeth Linos, and Graham Colditz investigate whether airport security screening would pass the National Screening Committee’s criteria for an effective screening test