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on Human Capital and Human Resource Management |
| By: | Bradler, Christiane; Dur, Robert; Neckermann, Susanne; Non, Arjan |
| Abstract: | This paper reports the results from a controlled field experiment designed to investigate the causal effect of public recognition on employee performance. We hired more than 300 employees to work on a three-hour data-entry task. In a random sample of work groups, workers unexpectedly received recognition after two hours of work. We find that recognition increases subsequent performance substantially, and particularly so when recognition is exclusively provided to the best performers. Remarkably, workers who did not receive recognition are mainly responsible for this performance increase. This result is consistent with workers having a preference for conformity. -- |
| Keywords: | employee motivation,recognition,reciprocity,conformity,field experiment |
| JEL: | C93 M52 |
| Date: | 2013 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:zewdip:13017&r=hrm |
| By: | Fabio Landini (MEDAlics and CRIOS, Bocconi University); Antonio Nicolò (University of Padua); Marco Piovesan (Department of Food and Resource Economics, University of Copenhagen) |
| Abstract: | Given the advantages of specialization, employers encourage their employees to acquire distinct expertise to better satisfy clients’ needs. However, when the client is unaware of the employees’ expertise and cannot be sorted out to the most competent employee by means of a gatekeeper, a mismatch can occur. In this paper we attempt to identify the optimal condition so an employer can eliminate this mismatch and offer a team bonus that provides the first-contacted employee with an incentive to refer the client to the correct expert. We show that the profitability of this referral contract increases with the agents’ degree of specialization and decreases with the clients’ competence at identifying the correct expert. Interestingly, a referral contract may be more profitable than an individual contract -that does not pay a team bonus- even if the former provides less incentive to the agents to improve their expertise. Thus, we provide a new rationale for the use of team bonuses even when the production function depends on a single employee’s effort. |
| Keywords: | Team and Individual Contracts, Matching Client-Expert, Incentives to Refer |
| JEL: | C72 D01 D21 D86 M52 |
| Date: | 2013–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:foi:wpaper:2013_9&r=hrm |
| By: | Ermanno Celeste Tortia (University of Trento; University of Turin and Namur, Belgium; University of Naples, Federico II) |
| Abstract: | The standard explanation of wage rigidity in principal agent and in efficiency wage models is related to worker risk-aversion. However, these explanations do not consider at least two important classes of empirical evidence: (1) In worker cooperatives workers appear to behave in a less risk averse way than in for profit firms and to accept fluctuating wages; (2) The emerging experimental evidence on the employment contract shows that most workers prefer higher but more uncertain wages to lower fixed wages. Workers do not appear to express a preference for fixed wages in all situations and different ownership forms, in our case worker cooperatives and for-profit firms, behave in different ways when dealing with the trade-off between wage rigidity and employment fluctuations. More specifically, worker cooperatives are characterized, in relative terms, by fixed employment levels and fluctuating wages, while for-profit firms are characterized by fixed wages and fluctuating employment. Our paper reinterprets these stylized facts by focusing on the relationship between wage rigidity and worker risk aversion in light of the presence of employer post contractual opportunism. Contractual incompleteness and private information on the side of the employer can compound in favouring the pursuit of the employer's objectives, when they diverge from the employee's ones. The idea of employer moral hazard is able to disentangle the observed behavioural differences in different ownership forms. By resorting to the standard efficiency wage framework, we show that, in the presence of employer moral hazard, employees in capitalistic firms generally prefer fixed wage, accepting this way a positive risk of lay-off. On the contrary, one of the main functions of fluctuating wages in worker cooperatives is to minimize the risk of lay-off. |
| Keywords: | risk aversion; employer contract; moral hazard; asymmetric information; hidden action; risk aversion; income insurance; employment insurance; worker cooperatives |
| Date: | 2013–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ent:wpaper:wp46&r=hrm |
| By: | Kilduff, Gavin J.; Anderson, Cameron; Willer, Robb |
| Abstract: | Recent research on status and group productivity has highlighted that status hierarchies encourage contributions to group efforts by rewarding contributors with enhanced status. However, that and other work has typically assumed that status hierarchies are widely agreed-upon among group members. Here we challenge this assumption, proposing that groups vary in their level of hierarchical consensus and that when groups fail to achieve high agreement, the status rewards motivating contributions are attenuated, undermining group performance. Results of two studies of task groups support our claims. We observed that status disagreements were quite common, particularly those in which two group members both viewed themselves as higher in status than the other, and that more dominant individuals were most likely to engage in these types of disagreements. Further, we found that such status disagreements led to diminished group performance and that this effect was driven by reduced contributions from the group members involved. These findings suggest that status consensus can vary substantially across groups, and that groups that are able to successfully coalesce around agreed-upon status hierarchies benefit from increased contributions and performance. |
| Keywords: | Business Administration, Management and Operations, Human Resources Management and Services, Shared Status Hierarchies, Group Dynamics |
| Date: | 2013–05–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cdl:indrel:qt77q7n684&r=hrm |
| By: | Dusan Paredes Araya (IDEAR - Department of Economics, Universidad Católica del Norte - Chile); Iván Jamett Sasonov (IDEAR - Department of Economics, Universidad Católica del Norte - Chile) |
| Abstract: | This paper suggests that long distance commuters obtain a wage compensation of 10% on average. With respect to the length of the trip, wages increase 5.7% per commuted hour. Regions with the highest influx of commuters are simultaneously those with higher wage compensations. This research suggests that the labor market alone does not seem to present evidence which foreshadows a reduction in LDC flows Moreover, this paper display how the labor market offers workers higher incentives in order to maintain the flow of long distance commuting. |
| Keywords: | Long Distance Commuting, Coarsened Exact Marching, wage compensation, wage distance gradient. |
| JEL: | J61 R23 |
| Date: | 2013–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cat:dtecon:dt201302&r=hrm |
| By: | Angelov, Nikolay (IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy); Johansson, Per (IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy); Lindahl, Erica (IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy) |
| Abstract: | This study investigates possible reasons for the gender difference in sickness absence. We estimate both short- and long-term effects of parenthood in a within-couple analysis based on the timing of parenthood. We find that after entering parenthood, women increase their sickness absence by between 0.5 days per month (during the child's third year) and 0.85 days per month (during year 17) more than their spouse. By investigating possible explanations for the observed effect, we conclude that the effect mainly stems from higher home commitment, which reduces women's labour market attachment and, in turn, increases female sickness absence. |
| Keywords: | Double burden; health investment; household work; labour market work; moral hazard; parenthood; sickness insurance; work absence |
| JEL: | C23 D13 I19 J22 |
| Date: | 2013–04–17 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:ifauwp:2013_009&r=hrm |
| By: | Thomas Kochan; Eileen Appelbaum; Carrie Leana; Jody Hoffer Gittell |
| Abstract: | This paper identifies a number of questions that need to be answered if the growing interest in building investment portfolios of firms that follow socially and environmentally sustainable practices is to be successful in transforming the financial institutions and analysts from a liability to an asset in expanding the number of sustainable firms in the economy. Evidence from three decades of research on “high performance workplace practices” is reviewed that identifies what is required for firms to align human capital and financial strategies. A longer term research and education agenda is presented for answering the remaining open questions. |
| Keywords: | inequality, poverty, human capital, investment, sustainability |
| JEL: | G G2 G24 J |
| Date: | 2013–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:epo:papers:2013-07&r=hrm |
| By: | Clément Bosquet; Pierre-Philippe Combes |
| Abstract: | We study the effect of a large set of department characteristics on individual publication records. We control for many individual time-varying characteristics, individual fixed-effects and reverse causality. Department characteristics have an explanatory power that can be as high as that of individual characteristics. The departments that generate most externalities are those where academics are homogeneous in terms of publication performance and have diverse research fields, and, to a lesser extent, large departments, with more women, older academics, star academics and foreign co-authors. Department specialisation in a field also favours publication in that field. More students per academic does not penalise publication. At the individual level, women and older academics publish less, while the average publication quality increases with average number of authors per paper, individual field diversity, number of published papers and foreign co-authors. |
| Keywords: | productivity determinants, economic geography, networks, economics of science, selection and endogeneity |
| JEL: | R12 J24 I3 |
| Date: | 2013–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cep:sercdp:0133&r=hrm |
| By: | Fatih Guvenen; Michelle Rendall |
| Abstract: | In this paper, we study the role of education as insurance against a bad marriage. Historically, due to disparities in earning power and education across genders, married women often found themselves in an economically vulnerable position, and had to suffer one of two fates in a bad marriage: either they get divorced (assuming it is available) and struggle as low-income single mothers, or they remain trapped in the marriage. In both cases, education can provide a route to emancipation for women. To investigate this idea, we build and estimate an equilibrium search model with education, marriage/divorce/remarriage, and household labor supply decisions. A key feature of the model is that women bear a larger share of the divorce burden, mainly because they are more closely tied to their children relative to men. Our focus on education is motivated by the fact that divorce laws typically allow spouses to keep the future returns from their human capital upon divorce (unlike their physical assets), making education a good insurance against divorce risk. However, as women further their education, the earnings gap between spouses shrinks, leading to more unstable marriages and, in turn, further increasing demand for education. The framework generates powerful amplification mechanisms, which lead to a large rise in divorce rates and a decline in marriage rates (similar to those observed in the US data) from relatively modest exogenous driving forces. Further, in the model, women overtake men in college attainment during the 1990s, a feature of the data that has proved challenging to explain. Our counterfactual experiments indicate that the divorce law reform of the 1970s played an important role in all of these trends, explaining more than one-quarter of college attainment rate of women post-1970s and one-half of the rise in labor supply for married women. |
| Keywords: | Marriage ; Women - Education |
| Date: | 2013 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:fedmwp:704&r=hrm |
| By: | Fatih Guvenen; Burhanettin Kuruscu; Serdar Ozkan |
| Abstract: | Wage inequality has been significantly higher in the United States than in continental European countries (CEU) since the 1970s. Moreover, this inequality gap has further widened during this period as the US has experienced a large increase in wage inequality, whereas the CEU has seen only modest changes. This paper studies the role of labor income tax policies for understanding these facts, focusing on male workers. We construct a life cycle model in which individuals decide each period whether to go to school, work, or stay non-employed. Individuals can accumulate skills either in school or while working. Wage inequality arises from differences across individuals in their ability to learn new skills as well as from idiosyncratic shocks. Progressive taxation compresses the (after-tax) wage structure, thereby distorting the incentives to accumulate human capital, in turn reducing the cross-sectional dispersion of (before-tax) wages. Consistent with the model, we empirically document that countries with more progressive labor income tax schedules have (i) significantly lower before-tax wage inequality at different points in time and (ii) experienced a smaller rise in wage inequality since the early 1980s. We then study the calibrated model and find that these policies can account for half of the difference between the US and the CEU in overall wage inequality and 84% of the difference in inequality at the upper end (log 90-50 differential). In a two-country comparison between the US and Germany, the combination of skill-biased technical change and changing progressivity of tax schedules explains all the difference between the evolution of inequality in these two countries since the early 1980s. |
| Date: | 2013 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:fedgfe:2013-20&r=hrm |
| By: | Susana Katherine Chacón Espejo (Master in Regional Sciences - Department of Economics, Universidad Católica del Norte - Chile); Dusan Paredes Araya (IDEAR - Department of Economics, Universidad Católica del Norte - Chile) |
| Abstract: | The spatial income inequality in Latin American countries is a recent academic affair. Particularly, the case of Chile highlights around the world because it has one of the highest individual and spatial inequality rates. This article analyzes the spatial income inequality in Chile during 1992 2011 evaluating the role of the spatial labor sorting through multilevel models. The findings show that human capital doesn't allocate randomly across the space but its spatial concentration at the biggest urban centers impacts significantly the income inequality between counties. These findings motivate the discussion about spatial dimension of the inequality and suggest that policymakers should consider ways to spread human capital throughout the nation as an alternative to reduce spatial inequality. |
| Keywords: | Spatial income inequality, spatial labor sorting, human capital, multilevel regression. |
| JEL: | O15 O18 R12 R23 |
| Date: | 2013–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cat:dtecon:dt201315&r=hrm |
| By: | Richard Blundell (University College London); Monica Costa Dias (Institute for Fiscal Studies and CEF-UP at the University of Porto); Costas Meghir (Cowles Foundation, Yale University); Jonathan Shaw (Institute for Fiscal Studies and University College London) |
| Abstract: | We consider the impact of Tax credits and income support programs on female education choice, employment, hours and human capital accumulation over the life-cycle. We thus analyze both the short run incentive effects and the longer run implications of such programs. By allowing for risk aversion and savings we are also able to quantify the insurance value of alternative programs. We find important incentive effects on education choice, and labor supply, with single mothers having the most elastic labor supply. Returns to labour market experience are found to be substantial but only for full-time employment, and especially for women with more than basic formal education. For those with lower education the welfare programs are shown to have substantial insurance value. Based on the model marginal increases to tax credits are preferred to equally costly increases in income support and to tax cuts, except by those in the highest education group. |
| Keywords: | Female labor supply, Welfare reform, Tax credits, Education choice, Dynamic discrete choice models, Life cycle models |
| JEL: | H2 H3 J22 J24 |
| Date: | 2013–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cwl:cwldpp:1892&r=hrm |
| By: | Pfeiffer, Friedhelm; Reuß, Karsten |
| Abstract: | The paper studies the power of educational investments in relation to transfers for fostering lifetime income and for reducing income inequality in Germany. The welfare analysis is based on a model of age-dependent human capital accumulation, featuring dynamic complementarities in skill formation over the life cycle, and calibrated for the period of ongoing demographic transition until 2080. If policy aims at reducing the inequality of lifetime income among people of the same generation, educational investments for people younger than or equal to seventeen do a better job compared to transfers in adulthood. In an intergenerational perspective all cohorts born after 1976 will gain from tax-financed additional investments in preschooleducation introduced in 2011. Additional investments into secondary education will, as a rule, not cause life time income to raise enough to compensate its costs. -- |
| Keywords: | early education,demographic change,inequality over the life span,redistributive policy |
| JEL: | D63 H55 I20 J11 |
| Date: | 2013 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:zewdip:13021&r=hrm |