Do Return Migrants Make Better Leaders?

While migration per se is not found to affect the quality of political institutions, it appears that leaders who studied abroad are associated with higher levels of democracy (p. 3).

That is from this interesting paper by Marion Mercier.

More educated leaders lead to more educated citizens

This paper looks at the contribution of political leaders to enhance citizens' education and investigate how the educational attainment of the population is affected while a leader with higher education remains in office. For this purpose, we consider educational transitions of political leaders in office and find that the educational attainment of population increases when a more educated leader remains in office. Furthermore, we also observe that the educational attainment of the population is negatively impacted when a country transitions from an educated leader to a less educated one. This result may help to explain the previous finding that more educated political leaders favor economic growth. That is from this paper by Luis Diaz-Serrano & Jessica Pérez. HT: Eugene Beaulieu

Who Makes a Good Leader?

A new paper by Gächter et al., in the new number of Economic Inquiry (October 2012). A draft is here.  

We examine the characteristics of effective leaders in a simple leader-follower voluntary contributions game. We focus on two factors: the individual's cooperativeness and the individual's beliefs about the cooperativeness of others. We find that groups perform best when led by those who are cooperatively inclined. Partly, this reflects a false consensus effect: cooperative leaders are more optimistic than noncooperators about the cooperativeness of followers. However, cooperative leaders contribute more than noncooperative leaders even after controlling for optimism. We conclude that differing leader contributions by differing types of leader in large part reflects social motivations.

Leadership lessons from very extreme conditions

Real leaders, wrote the novelist David Foster Wallace, are people who “help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.”

As a historian at the Harvard Business School, I wrote a case studyabout him that has drawn more interest from executives than any other I have taught.

As some talented research assistants and I worked on the study, I was struck by Shackleton’s ability to respond to constantly changing circumstances. When his expedition encountered serious trouble, he had to reinvent the team’s goals. He had begun the voyage with a mission of exploration, but it quickly became a mission of survival.

This is from this fascinating NYT article.