​​​​Timothy Gubler

13. "No Margin, No Mission? How Emergency Medical Service Professionals Attend to Competing Financial and Social Goals" (with Haibo Liu and Alexandru Roman). Revision Requested, Strategic Management Journal. Currently under second revision (2nd R&R). Available on SSRN HERE. Prior health-focused version on patient ability to pay HERE.  

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We study how Emergency Medical Service (EMS) crews attend to competing financial and social goals during 9-1-1 calls. Prior work has documented challenges from pursuing competing organization-level goals. However, less is known about how employees approach these challenges when goals are non-separable in key tasks. We propose that EMS crews concurrently attend to competing goals across calls by varying goal prioritization to achieve the goal most at risk, depending on contextual factors. Using quasi-random assignment of 9-1-1 patients to crews in 31 US states, we find crews routinely prioritize the agency’s financial goal by providing more services to high-paying patients. This increases with agency financial need but decreases for higher acuity patients. Surprisingly, these results manifest across most agencies, regardless of profit orientation. 

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14. "Individual-level Origins of Firm-level Human Capital Resources" (with Ryan Cooper and David Kryscynski). Preparing for submission. Available by Request.

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Understanding the emergence of firm-level human capital resources from individual-level human capital is crucial to explaining how firms can create and sustain competitive advantage from their people. We theorize that higher similarity among the individual-level components of a firm’s founding human capital resource leads to higher subsequent average overlap between individuals and the established firm-level human capital resource, and that this higher overlap improves firm performance. Analysis of individual- and firm-level human capital portfolios constructed using data from 872 real estate brokerages suggests that higher individual-level human capital similarity among agents at founding positively relates to individual-firm human capital overlap in future years, and that higher individual-firm human capital overlap positively relates to future firm sales. These results imply that managers from founding onward must carefully craft and manage individual- and firm-level human capital resources to generate persistent performance advantages.

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15. "Specialized Human Capital in Professional Services: Task Specificity and Firm Performance." (with Ryan Cooper and David Kryscynski). Working Paper. 

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This paper examines the relationship between the autonomous specialization decisions of service professionals and the tacit human capital they develop. As individuals specialize in production in response to market and organizational factors, they develop task-specific human capital which induces them to continue to specialize. Task specificity of human capital benefits the firm due to its higher productivity, even after negative shocks to the market. Individual specialization in response to market forces also leads to human capital overlap, or shared expertise among co-workers, which may have positive and negative impacts on the firm. Using a novel approach that draws on longitudinal data from the Utah real estate industry, we examine these forces empirically and find that task-specific human capital does benefit firms, even after widespread negative market shocks. Overlap also benefits firms, though it is a substitute for task specificity rather than a complement. 

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16. "On a Professional High: How Critical 9-1-1 Calls Influence EMS Crew Performance on Subsequent Calls." (with Haibo Liu and Alexandru Roman). Working Paper. 

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On-the-job experiences often significantly differ from employee expectations. We argue that decreasing the incongruity gap–the discrepancy between expectations and actual job experience–will lead to improved performance. We examine our theoretical expectations in the context of Emergency Medical Services (EMS). Using data from 31 US states, we find that EMS crews significantly improve response performance on calls following a critical call. Critical calls demand substantial intervention highly utilizes EMS crew training and skills. This effect is stronger for smaller agencies and for calls following the critical call that are more urgent. Interviews with EMS professionals reveal that this improved performance may be driven by an "excitement" following the opportunity to apply the skills that EMS professionals are trained for but rarely get to use in their daily and routine calls. Our research speaks to the benefits of decreasing incongruity between expected and actual job roles. 

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17. "The Effects of Social and Human Capital on Negotiating Agent Performance: Evidence from NFL Agent Contracts." (with Ryan Cooper and Jim Oldroyd). Working Paper. 

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In this paper we analyze the NFL agent industry to understand how ties between agents and clients are formed and to identify to what extent superior performance on the part of NFL agents is attributable to their own ability compared to the ability and market value of their clients. We find that social ties are an important determinant of dyad formation, but that the types of ties that matter change over the course of a player’s career. We also find that agents have little effect on contract outcomes, on average, raising an important question of why they are employed at all.

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