Ben A Rissing

About

Professor Ben A. Rissing studies regulatory, mobility, and social processes that operate behind the scenes to shape important facets of modern careers. His research includes examining how government regulators influence immigrant hiring and compensation, the performance implications of worker mobility, and the functioning of new organizational recruitment systems reliant on social connections. He negotiates access to and analyzes unique personnel data within U.S. government agencies, for-profit businesses, and university admissions systems, often encompassing millions of observations. Using modern data analytics, he builds datasets by joining disparate administrative, application, and employee records to test theories with key implications for governments, workers, and practitioners. Dr. Rissing earned his doctorate in management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Sloan School of Management, along with master's degrees in management science and engineering management from MIT and Duke University, respectively. He also holds a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Virginia. Before joining Cornell University, he served as the Hugh W. Pearson Visiting Professor of Commerce, Organizations and Entrepreneurship at Brown University and was a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the Brown University Watson Institute for International Studies. Additionally, he conducted research as a Wertheim Fellow with Harvard Law School.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Business
• Economics
• Psychology
• Engineering
• Law
• Computer Science
• Accounting
• Labour economics
• Marketing

Selected publications

• Strength from Within: Internal Mobility and the Retention of High Performers

  Organization Science · 2020 · 37 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  We develop and test a theoretically informed and generalizable empirical framework for evaluating the performance gap between internally and externally hired workers. First, human capital theory predicts that internal hires will be immediately more productive than external hires. Second, contextual learning predicts that internal hires will be more productive with time. Finally, theories of commitment, which are rarely applied to this literature, predict that internal advancement enhances retent…

  PublisherDOI

• Best in Class: The Returns on Application Endorsements in Higher Education

  Administrative Science Quarterly · 2018-03-05 · 25 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  While scholars have shown that well-connected applicants are advantaged in selection processes, less understood is whether such applicants produce important returns to the organization when key decision makers favor them. We begin to address this gap by investigating whether and why application endorsements―an informal practice whereby certain individuals (i.e., endorsers) advocate for particular applicants―affect organizational selection during the screening of applicants. Through the analysis…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Testing Attestations

  Industrial and Labor Relations Review · 2016-03-18 · 12 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Each year, hundreds of thousands of immigrants seek legal employment in the United States. Similar to many developed countries, the United States has established immigration policies to protect its citizens’ employment. This study empirically assesses, for the first time, the relationship between U.S. workers’ unemployment rates and immigrant work authorization outcomes, as determined by one key U.S. immigration program—the labor certification process. This program explicitly requires that no wi…

  PublisherDOI

• Trust but sometimes verify: Regulatory enforcement in attestation‐based immigration programs

  Regulation & Governance · 2020 · 5 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This study examines a little‐known but prolific form of regulation: organizations' self‐reported compliance attestations. The paper presents systematic analyses of multiple assessment procedures in the U.S. Department of Labor's (DoL) labor certification program, a frequent requirement for immigrant employment‐based permanent residency. In applications, employers attest to (i) recruiting a qualified immigrant and (ii) the lack of available U.S. workers. DoL assessment procedures to eval…

  PublisherDOI

• The Need for Speed: The Role of Employers in Immigrant Work Visa Regulatory Prioritization

  Industrial and Labor Relations Review · 2024-10-11 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Employers are central, yet understudied, actors in the immigrant work authorization process. The authors motivate and empirically assess three central theoretical accounts to explain employers’ regulatory prioritization of specific immigrant work visa applications: the role of immigrant human capital, employers’ past filing experience, and the relative dissimilarity of the focal application to employers’ past applications. These accounts are tested using U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Gary Gereffi

  56 shared

• Richard B. Freeman

  Harvard University

  37 shared

• Barry S. Myers

  Duke University

  36 shared

• Larry Kramer

  36 shared

• Elaine Bernardt

  Fox College

  36 shared

• Kristina M. Johnson

  Corteva (United States)

  36 shared

• Dan Siciliano

  Fox College

  36 shared

• Jeff Glass

  36 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Institute for Work and Employment Research

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  2013

• Masters in Engineering Management, Engineering Management

  Duke University

  2006

• Bachelor's of Science in Mechanical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering

  University of Virginia

  2005

Awards & honors

• Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching, SUNY (2023)
• Best Paper Proceedings Recipient, Academy of Management (202…
• Shah Family Dean’s Excellence Funding Award, Cornell Univers…
• MacIntyre Award for Exemplary Teaching and Advising, Cornell…
• Best Paper Proceedings Recipient, Academy of Management (201…

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