Are you a jerk in the workplace?

In his book The No Asshole Rule, Stanford business professor Robert I. Sutton pointed out that, jerks in your workplace not only worsen morale and productivity but also impose huge costs to the company as a whole. Readers can also take a self-rating questionnaire to see whether they themselves are "certified" assholes or not.

To me, I think it is also interesting to ask, whether assholes at the top of the corporate ladder have more negative impacts on the company than those at the middle or the bottom? Are there certain traits or charateristics to a boss that are more likely to attract (expel) jerks to (away from) his/her leadership? If so, what are those traits? Moreover, the author has dealt a lot with bullying behavior in the workplace, but such behavior is mostly explicit, jerks and assholes sometimes do more harm to their coworkers by stabbing them in the back, stirring things up or setting people at loggerheads, which are more implicit and hard to detect. Then does the specified rule in the book apply to these activities also? Or how can we do about them?

Jonathan Levin wins Clark Medal

The American Economic Association has announced that this year's John Bates Clark medal was awarded to Stanford University economist Jonathan Levin for his "influential research on the economics of contracting, the organization and design of markets, subprime lending, and on empirical methods for studying imperfect competition."

Also see here, here and here.

Trouble, Europa...

The sovereign debt crisis may become worse in Europe, see here and here.