ABSTRACT
We examine how a specific external and uncontrollable factor—the day’s weather—affects subjective performance evaluations. We use an experiment to test how weather influences biases that the prior management accounting literature shows affect subjective evaluations. First, we examine if weather introduces a directional bias to subjective evaluations. Next, we explore if weather leaves individuals more prone to other decision biases. Contrary to popular belief, we find no evidence that sunny weather results in more positive (i.e., lenient) evaluations. However, we find evidence that weather influences a bias documented in the prior literature, the spillover effect. Specifically, we find this bias is significantly less pronounced on cloudy days relative to sunny days in geographic locations where the weather is more likely to influence evaluators.
Data Availability: Data are available from the authors upon request.
JEL Classifications: C91; D91; M40; M41; M50; M52.
