You are invited to join the weekly Nuremberg Research Seminar in Economics on 28 January 2026, from 13.15 to 14.45 pm. The seminar will be held in room LG 0.423. Matthias Heinz (University of Cologne) will be talking about “Catch Me If You Can: The Wide-Ranging Effects of Barriers to Employee Theft on Substitution, Turnover, and the Gender Gap in Shadow Income”.
More information can be found here:
For firms, employee theft is a costly challenge, resulting in lost firm revenues, fostering non-compliant cultures, and creating legal risks. Quantifying the exact scale of theft is notoriously difficult, and causal evidence on effective prevention strategies and the resulting employee responses as well as gender wage gaps caused by differences in misconduct remains scarce. We conduct an RCT in a pub-style restaurant chain where servers can steal by failing to register a self-serving breakfast buffet order and instead pocketing the customer’s payment. Our intervention raises the barriers for this misconduct by involving multiple employees in the buffet ordering process. We find the treatment increases registered breakfast buffet orders by 8.5 percent compared to the control group, while the physical consumption of core buffet ingredients and of the complementary good most consumers order with the buffet is identical. The treatment effect is significantly larger for male than for female servers, revealing a substantial gender gap in shadow income (approx. 15 percent) that our intervention effectively eliminates. Servers respond to the reduced potential for theft by increasing effort to generate higher tips and by quitting the firm. Overall, our results show that implementing a single compliance-enhancing measure can trigger a wide range of employee responses, from a strategic shift in legal effort to increased turnover and the elimination of the gender wage gap in shadow income.