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on Human Capital and Human Resource Management |
| By: | Antoni, Manfred; Gumpert, Anna; Steimer, Henrike |
| Abstract: | How do geographic frictions affect firm organization? We show theoretically and empirically that geographic frictions increase the use of middle managers in multi-establishment firms. In our model, we assume that a CEO's time is a resource in limited supply, shared across headquarters and establishments. Geographic frictions increase the costs of accessing the CEO. Hiring middle managers at one establishment substitutes for CEO time, which is reallocated across all establishments. Consequently, geographic frictions between the headquarters and one establishment affect the organization of all establishments of a firm. Our model is consistent with novel facts about multi-establishment firm organization that we document using administrative data from Germany. We exploit the opening of high-speed train routes to show that not only the establishments directly affected by faster travel times but also the other establishments of the firm adjust their organization. Our findings imply that local conditions propagate across space through firm organization. |
| Keywords: | firm organization; Geography; knowledge hierarchy; multi-establishment firm |
| JEL: | D21 D22 D24 |
| Date: | 2019–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:13837&r=all |
| By: | Khasieva, D. |
| Abstract: | During last 10 years there has been a significant rise in the number of research, which explores gender diversity as an important business asset. These studies proved the connection between women presence in the team and firm performance, innovation level of firm, and its competitive ability. These findings made diversity one of the leading directions in the development of human resource management practices. Our study is dedicated to exploring the application of talent management, as a part of human resource management, to women with respect to their specific features. Our goal is to evaluate how these practices can impact on firm performance and to extract factors, which regulate diversity adaptation process. With this purpose, the literature review was performed. In this working paper, we present the key points of literature review in field of diversity management and talent management, identify the research gap, formulate research questions, set research framework, and ground them in the existing theories. |
| Keywords: | talent management practices, talent management practices, gender diversity, female talents, Russian context, |
| Date: | 2019 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:sps:wpaper:16129&r=all |
| By: | Zölitz, Ulf |
| Abstract: | A substantial share of university instruction happens in tutorial sessions-small group instruction given parallel to lectures. In this paper, we study whether instructors with a higher academic rank teach tutorials more effectively in a setting where students are randomly assigned to tutorial groups. We find this to be largely not the case. Academic rank is unrelated to students' current and future performance and only weakly positively related to students' course evaluations. Building on these results, we discuss different staffing scenarios that show that universities can substantially reduce costs by increasingly relying on lower-ranked instructors for tutorial teaching. |
| JEL: | I21 I24 J24 |
| Date: | 2019–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:13883&r=all |
| By: | White, Michael (Policy Studies Institute); Bryson, Alex (University College London) |
| Abstract: | Using nationally representative surveys of workplaces with 50 or more employees we find the adoption of High-Performance Work Systems (HPWS) in the public sector are positively correlated with workplace financial performance and the implementation of workplace organizational change. The associations are stable in 2004 and 2011, despite the intervening recession and cuts in public finance. The results are thus broadly consistent with studies finding similar positive correlations between HPWS and workplace performance in the private sector. There was little heterogeneity in effects across sectors within the public sector, with the exception of health services where the effects of HPWS on workplace change were lower. |
| Keywords: | high performance work systems, public sector, financial performance, organizational change |
| JEL: | J45 M5 |
| Date: | 2019–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp12517&r=all |
| By: | Christopher Cornwell; Ian M. Schmutte; Daniela Scur |
| Abstract: | Firms' hiring and firing decisions affect the entire labor market. Managers often make these decisions, yet the effects of management on labor allocation remains largely unexplored. To study the relationship between a firm's management practices and how it recruits, retains and dismisses its employees, we link a survey of firm-level management practices to production and employee records from Brazil. We find that firms using structured management practices consistently hire and retain better workers, and fire more selectively. Good production workers match with firms using structured personnel management practices. By contrast, better managers match with firms using structured operations management practices. |
| Keywords: | labor allocation, managers, management practices, productivity |
| JEL: | D22 M11 J31 |
| Date: | 2019–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp1644&r=all |
| By: | de Clippel, Geoffroy; Eliaz, Kfir; Fershtman, Daniel; Rozen, Kareen |
| Abstract: | Each period, a principal must assign one of two agents to some task. Profit is stochastically higher when the agent is qualified for the task. The principal cannot observe qualification. Her only decision is which of the two agents to assign, if any, given the public history of selections and profits. She cannot commit to any rule. While she maximizes expected discounted profits, each agent maximizes his expected discounted selection probabilities. We fully characterize when the principal's first-best payoff is attainable in equilibrium, and identify a simple strategy profile achieving this first-best whenever feasible. We propose a new refinement for dynamic mechanisms (without transfers) where the designer is a player, under which we show the principal's next-best, when the first-best is unachievable, is the one-shot Nash. We show how our analysis extends to variations on the game accommodating more agents, caring about one's own performance, cheap talk and losses. |
| Keywords: | dynamic allocation; mechanism design without commitment; mechanism design without transfers |
| Date: | 2019–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:13891&r=all |
| By: | Babina, Tania; Ma, Wenting; Moser, Christian; Ouimet, Paige; Zarutskie, Rebecca |
| Abstract: | Why do young firms pay less? Using confidential microdata from the US Census Bureau, we find lower earnings among workers at young firms. However, we argue that such measurement is likely subject to worker and firm selection. Exploiting the two-sided panel nature of the data to control for relevant dimensions of worker and firm heterogeneity, we uncover a positive and significant young-firm pay premium. Furthermore, we show that worker selection at firm birth is related to future firm dynamics, including survival and growth. We tie our empirical findings to a simple model of pay, employment, and dynamics of young firms. |
| Keywords: | Young-Firm Pay Premium, Selection, Worker and Firm Heterogeneity, Firm Dynamics, Startups |
| JEL: | D2 D22 E2 E24 J3 J30 J31 M1 M13 |
| Date: | 2019 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:95382&r=all |
| By: | Mariana Carrera; Heather Royer; Mark Stehr; Justin Sydnor; Dmitry Taubinsky |
| Abstract: | A large literature treats take-up of commitment contracts, in the form of choice-set restrictions or penalties, as a smoking gun for (awareness of) self-control problems. This paper provides new techniques for examining the validity of this assumption, as well as a new approach for detecting (awareness of) self-control problems. Theoretically, we show that with some uncertainty about the future, demand for commitment contracts is closer to a special case than to a robust implication of models of limited self-control. In a field experiment with 1292 members of a fitness facility, we find that many participants take up commitment contracts both for going to the gym more and for going to the gym less, and there is a significant positive correlation in demand for these two types of contracts. This suggests that commitment contract take-up reflects, at least in part, something other than the desire to change own future behavior, such as demand effects or "noisy valuation." Moreover, we find that commitment contract take-up is negatively related to awareness of self-control problems: a novel information treatment that increased awareness of self-control problems reduced demand for commitment contracts. We address the limitations of using commitment contracts as a measurement tool by showing that a combination of belief forecasts and willingness to pay for linear incentives provides more robust identification of limited self-control and people's awareness of it. We use the methodology to obtain some of the first parameter estimates of partially-sophisticated quasi-hyperbolic discounting in the field. |
| JEL: | C9 D9 I12 |
| Date: | 2019–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:26161&r=all |