Personnel, Leadership and Education
The PhD field Personnel, Leadership and Education brings together research on how people learn, work, lead, and invest in skills across organizations, labor markets, and education systems. It combines the expertise of Professors Uschi Backes-Gellner, Anne Brenøe, Lauren Howe, Patrick Lehnert, Jochen Menges, Carmit Segal, and Katarina Zigova, spanning personnel economics, leadership and organizational behavior, managerial and behavioral economics, vocational education and training, human capital, gender and labor-market inequality, lifelong learning, and the future of work. Doctoral students in this field study topics such as recruitment and incentives, leadership and motivation, teamwork and emotions in organizations, occupational and educational choice, training and skill formation, innovation, work organization, and the design of education and labor-market institutions. Methodologically, the field is explicitly interdisciplinary and draws on rigorously designed experiments, field studies, large-scale archival and administrative data, applied microeconometrics, people analytics and large language models, as well as qualitative and mixed-method approaches. The field prepares doctoral students to produce academically rigorous research with direct relevance for organizations, workers, and education policy.
