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on Human Capital and Human Resource Management |
| By: | V. Pelligra; T. Reggiani; T. Medda |
| Abstract: | One of the most common criticisms about the external validity of lab experiments in economics concerns the representativeness of participants usually considered in these studies. The ever-increasing number of experiments and the prevalent location of research centers in university campuses produced a peculiar category of subjects - Students with high level of laboratory experience built through repeated participations in experimental sessions. We investigate whether the experience accumulated in this way biases subjects’ behaviour in a set of simple games widely used to study social preferences (Dictator Game, Ultimatum Game, Trust Game, and Prisoner’s Dilemma Game). Our main finding shows that subjects with a high level of experience in lab experiments do not behave in a significantly different way from novices. |
| Keywords: | lab experiment,External Validity,Experimental Methodology,Experience |
| Date: | 2016 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cns:cnscwp:201610&r=hrm |
| By: | Jeffery Flory; Andreas Leibbrandt; John List |
| Abstract: | Workplace misbehaviors are often governed by explicit monitoring and strict punishment. Such enforcement activities can serve to lessen worker productivity and harm worker morale. We take a different approach to curbing worker misbehavior-bonuses. Examining more than 6500 donor phone calls across more than 80 workers, we use a natural field experiment to investigate how different wage contracts influence workers' propensity to break workplace rules in harmful ways. Our findings show that even though standard relative performance pay contracts, relative to a fixed wage scheme, increase productivity, they have a dark side: they cause considerable cheating and sabotage of co-workers. Yet, even in such environments, by including an unexpected bonus, the employer can substantially curb worker misbehavior. In this manner, our findings reveal how employers can effectively leverage bonuses to eliminate undesired behaviors induced by performance pay contracts. |
| Date: | 2016 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:feb:natura:00583&r=hrm |
| By: | Juan Francisco Jimeno (Banco de España); Aitor Lacuesta (Banco de España); Marta Martínez-Matute (Banco de España); Ernesto Villanueva (Banco de España) |
| Abstract: | We study how formal education and experience in the labour market correlate with measures of human capital available in thirteen countries participating in the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competences (PIAAC), an international study assessing adults’ proficiency in numeracy and literacy. Two findings are consistent with the notion that, in producing human capital, work experience is a substitute for formal education for respondents with compulsory schooling. Firstly, the number of years of working experience correlates with performance in PIAAC mostly among low-educated individuals. Secondly, individual fixed-effect models suggest that workers in jobs intensive in numerical tasks – relative to reading tasks – perform relatively better in the numeracy section of the PIAAC test than in the reading part. The results are driven by young individuals with low levels of schooling and hold mainly for simple tasks, suggesting that our findings are not fully generated by the sorting of workers across jobs. A back-of-the-envelope estimate suggests that the contribution of on-the-job learning to skill formation is a quarter of that of compulsory schooling in the countries we analyse. |
| Keywords: | human capital, tasks, education, working experience, cognitive skills |
| JEL: | J24 J31 I20 |
| Date: | 2016–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bde:wpaper:1635&r=hrm |
| By: | Oxholm, Anne Sophie (COHERE) |
| Abstract: | In many health care systems payers reward physicians for reaching predetermined performance targets. These targets may be based on measures for which own performance is difficult to predict. This paper uses a principal-agent model to analyse physicians’ response to a target-based performance payment and the role uncertainty about own performance plays. It is shown that physicians’ response depends on their type (determined by abilities and preferences), the size of the performance payment, and their uncertainty about own performance. Only in the presence of uncertainty do all physician types respond to the target payment, and they respond by increasing effort. Meanwhile, increased uncertainty leads some physician types to reduce the magnitude of their response and other types to increase their response. Therefore, when designing target-based payment schemes it is important to perform baseline measurements to assess the distribution of physician types and to predict physicians’ ability to assess own performance. |
| Keywords: | Health care; Pay for performance; Target-based payment; Uncertainty |
| JEL: | C91 I11 |
| Date: | 2016–11–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:sduhec:2016_009&r=hrm |
| By: | David B. Johnson (University of Central Missouri); Abhijit Ramalingam (University of East Anglia) |
| Abstract: | Literature exploring pay finds that highly(less) productive workers often earn less (more) than they would if compensation perfectly reflected productivity, indicating "wage compression". Using a laboratory experiment, we show that such wage compression may partially be due to managers' own preference for equality. |
| Keywords: | experiment, inequality, managers, promotions, wages |
| JEL: | C91 M51 M52 |
| Date: | 2016–08–25 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:uea:wcbess:16-13&r=hrm |
| By: | Helmut Dietl (Department of Business Administration, University of Zurich); Carlos Gomez-Gonzalez (Facultad Derecho y CC. Soziales, University of Castilla-La Mancha); Cornel Nesseler (Department of Business Administration, University of Zurich) |
| Abstract: | We empirically compare the performance of female and male team managers. We find that female team managers never perform worse than male team managers and that females work under significantly worse conditions than males. Additionally, we find that specialized experience has no influence. Special- 1 ized experience means having worked previously as an employee in the same industry. Our dataset consists of female and male managers in women soccer leagues acroos countries, viz., France, Germany, and Norway. Managers in team sports usually have exactly the same tasks (selection, coordination, and motivation of team members) as team managers in other industries. The limited number of women in top management positions in some of these industries and the lack of available data do not often allow comparisons. Our study, which includes a fair number of female team managers and a clear measurement of performance, can help understanding stereotypical behaviors. Therefore, our results have important implications for industries, companies, and clubs who oppose employing female team managers. |
| Keywords: | Performance, Female managers, discrimination, Working conditions |
| JEL: | J16 J7 L83 |
| Date: | 2017–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zrh:wpaper:364&r=hrm |
| By: | Richard, Sébastien (Department of Business and Economics); Skagen, Kristian (COHERE); Pedersen, Kjeld Møller (COHERE); Huver, Benjamin (Department of Business and Economics) |
| Abstract: | Presenteeism occurs when an employee attends work while sick or unwell. It is a major Human Resource and organizational issue: in addition to productivity losses, presenteeism is believed to increase sickness absence and decrease self-rated health. However, by its very nature, presenteeism cannot be monitored in the same manner as sickness absence. We show how the probability of presenteeism can be estimated from simple absence data by means of a zero-inflated binomial regression analysis (ZINB). The approach is validated on a Danish data set that contains self-reported sickness absence and presenteeism, whereas causality and reliability are verified by conducting Monte-Carlo simulations. The objective of paper was to explore how far the traditional but costly tool used to assess presenteeism behaviour, a questionnaire, could advantageously be replaced by a statistical approach that relies on easily available information on sickness. We show that the ZINB model captures presenteeism well via the inflation process and delivers insight on both absenteeism and presenteeism. Using Monte Carlo simulations, we further highlight that the model can be used to compute a global indicator, propensity for presenteeism, even when important assumptions are violated. |
| Keywords: | Presenteeism; sickness absence; ZINB |
| JEL: | I10 J22 J28 |
| Date: | 2017–01–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:sduhec:2017_001&r=hrm |
| By: | Piva, Mariacristina (Universita’ Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Piacenza, Italy); Tani, Massimiliano (UNSW Canberra, Australia, and IZA, Bonn); Vivarelli, Marco (UNU-MERIT, IZA, Bonn, and Universita’ Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Piacenza, Italy) |
| Abstract: | The aim of this paper is to investigate the productivity impact of business visits, relative to traditional drivers of productivity enhancement, namely capital formation and R&D. To carry out the analysis, we combine unique and novel data on business visits sourced from the U.S. National Business Travel Association with OECD data on R&D and capital formation. The resulting unbalanced panel covers on average 16 sectors per year in 10 countries during the period 1998-2011 (2,262 observations). Our results suggest that mobility through business visits is an effective mechanism to improve productivity. The estimated effect is about half as large as investing in R&D, supporting viewing business visits as a form of long-term investment rather than pure consumption expenditure. In a nutshell, our outcomes support the need to recognise the private and social value of business mobility. |
| Keywords: | Business visits, labour mobility, knowledge, R&D, productivity |
| JEL: | O32 O33 O34 J24 D83 |
| Date: | 2017–01–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:unm:unumer:2017004&r=hrm |
| By: | Mamatzakis, Emmanuel; Xu, Bingrun |
| Abstract: | The paper examines the performance of Chinese equity mutual funds and investigates the impact of fund managerial attributes (tenure, team management structure, management educational factors and funds under management) on equity mutual fund performance during the sample period from 2005 to 2013. The equity fund performance is measured using the Stochastic Frontier Approach (SFA) and several traditional fund performance methods such as Jensen’s Alpha and the Sharp ratio. The paper reveals that team–management in a large fund size has a negative impact on fund performance. A fund managed by managers with a longer tenure will perform worse than a fund whose managers are relatively new to a fund. Furthermore, there is a negative relationship between funds under management and equity fund performance. This paper finds that only fund managers with Master’s degrees have a positive impact on fund performance in the Chinese equity mutual fund industry. |
| Keywords: | equity fund performance, managerial attributes |
| JEL: | G20 G23 G30 G34 |
| Date: | 2016–04–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:76139&r=hrm |
| By: | Pekkala Kerr, Sari; Kerr, William; Özden, Çağlar; Parsons, Christopher |
| Abstract: | The global distribution of talent is highly skewed and the resources available to countries to develop and utilize their best and brightest vary substantially. The migration of skilled workers across countries tilts the deck even further. Using newly available data, we first review the landscape of global talent mobility, which is both asymmetric and rising in importance. We next consider the determinants of global talent flows at the individual and firm levels and sketch some important implications. Third, we review the national gatekeepers for skilled migration and broad differences in approaches used to select migrants for admission. Looking forward, the capacity of people, firms, and countries to successfully navigate this tangled web of global talent will be critical to their success. |
| JEL: | F15 F22 J15 J31 J44 L14 L26 O31 O32 O33 |
| Date: | 2017–01–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bof:bofrdp:2017_002&r=hrm |