nep-hrm New Economics Papers
on Human Capital and Human Resource Management
Issue of 2023‒10‒02
six papers chosen by
Patrick Kampkötter, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen


  1. Women in Management and the Gender Pay Gap By Virginia Sondergeld; Katharina Wrohlich
  2. Equity Pay In Networked Teams By Krishna Dasaratha; Benjamin Golub; Anant Shah
  3. Graying and staying on the job: The welfare implications of employment protection for older workers By Todd Morris; Benoit Dostie
  4. Gender differences in management styles during crisis and the effect on firm performance By Valerija Botric; Sonja Radas; Bruno Skrinjaric
  5. Do Teachers' Labor Contracts Matter? By Aparicio Fenoll, Ainoa; Quaranta, Roberto
  6. Diversify or Not? – The Link between Global Sourcing of ICT Goods and Firm Performance By Alexander Schiersch; Irene Bertschek; Thomas Niebel

  1. By: Virginia Sondergeld; Katharina Wrohlich
    Abstract: We analyze the impact of women’s managerial representation on the gender pay gap among employees on the establishment level using German Linked-Employer-Employee- Data from the years 2004 to 2018. For identification of a causal effect we employ a panel model with establishment fixed effects and industry-specific time dummies. Our results show that a higher share of women in management significantly reduces the gender pay gap within the firm. An increase in the share of women in first-level management e.g. from zero to above 33 percent decreases the adjusted gender pay gap from a baseline of 15 percent by 1.2 percentage points, i.e. to roughly 14 percent. The effect is stronger for women in second-level than first-level management, indicating that women managers with closer interactions with their subordinates have a higher impact on the gender pay gap than women on higher management levels. The results are similar for East and West Germany, despite the lower gender pay gap and more gender egalitarian social norms in East Germany. From a policy perspective, we conclude that increasing the number of women in management positions has the potential to reduce the gender pay gap to a limited extent. However, further policy measures will be needed in order to fully close the gender gap in pay.
    Keywords: Gender pay gap, women in management, board diversity, two-way fixed effects, linked employer-employee data
    JEL: J16 J31 J71
    Date: 2023
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:diw:diwwpp:dp2046&r=hrm
  2. By: Krishna Dasaratha; Benjamin Golub; Anant Shah
    Abstract: A group of agents each exert effort to produce a joint output, with the complementarities between their efforts represented by a (weighted) network. Under equity compensation, a principal motivates the agents to work by giving them shares of the output. We describe the optimal equity allocation. It is characterized by a neighborhood balance condition: any two agents receiving equity have the same (weighted) total equity assigned to their neighbors. We also study the problem of selecting the team of agents who receive positive equity, and show this team must form a tight-knit subset of the complementarity network, with any pair being complementary to one another or jointly to another team member. Finally, we give conditions under which the amount of equity used for compensation is increasing in the strength of a team's complementarities and discuss several other applications.
    Date: 2023–08
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2308.14717&r=hrm
  3. By: Todd Morris; Benoit Dostie
    Abstract: We study the welfare implications of employment protection for older workers, exploiting recent bans on mandatory retirement across Canadian provinces. Using linked employer-employee tax data, we show that the bans cause large and similar reductions in job separation rates and retirement hazards at age 65, with further reductions at higher ages. The effects vary substantially across industries and firms, and around two-fifths of the adjustments occur between ban announcement and implementation dates. We find no evidence that the demand for older workers falls, but the welfare effects are mediated by spillovers on savings behavior, workplace injuries, and spousal retirement timing.
    Keywords: employment protection; retirement; welfare; active and passive savings responses; health effects; spousal spillovers
    JEL: J26 J78 H55
    Date: 2023
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:rsi:irersi:15&r=hrm
  4. By: Valerija Botric (The Institute of Economics, Zagreb); Sonja Radas (The Institute of Economics, Zagreb); Bruno Skrinjaric (The Institute of Economics, Zagreb)
    Abstract: This paper aims to shed light on gender differences in firm performance in a period that entails an unprecedented crisis with specific effects on gender roles, i.e., COVID-19. The analysis focuses on Croatian high-tech manufacturing and knowledge-intensive service sector SMEs. Previous literature indicates that the obstacles the SMEs face may be even more significant for women-owned firms. Specifically, women entrepreneurs find it more challenging to secure social and financial capital. Women often face restrictions on their working hours due to societal pressure and family obligations, and they are rarely well-connected because they are often not members of influential business networks. Literature also suggests that the usual pressures on female working hours have disproportionally increased during the COVID-19 imposed lockdowns, so the general expectation is that women entrepreneurs were not able to cope equally with the changed market circumstances. In this study, we consider a causation-effectuation management framework to investigate how women- and men-owned SMEs used these management styles to address the business challenges in the COVID-19 crisis. Our contribution aims explicitly to answer the invitation made in recent literature to explore how gender influences the effects of the four dimensions of effectuation on firm performance.
    Keywords: women entrepreneurship; firm performance; management styles; COVID-19
    JEL: B54 J16 L26
    Date: 2023–07
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iez:wpaper:2301&r=hrm
  5. By: Aparicio Fenoll, Ainoa (University of Turin); Quaranta, Roberto (Collegio Carlo Alberto)
    Abstract: Previous literature on the effect of tenured and tenure-track vs. non-tenure-track professors on students' performance at university finds contrasting results. Our paper is the first to test whether tenured/tenure-track and non-tenure-track teachers differently affect students' performance at school. We use data on standardized test scores of a representative sample of primary and secondary school students in Italy and information on their Italian and mathematics teachers' labor contracts. Controlling for class- and subject-fixed effects, we find that non-tenure-track teachers decrease students' performance by 0.21 standard deviation. This detrimental effect is fully explained because non-tenure-track teachers are less experienced. In line with previous findings on the adverse effects of teachers' absences, non-tenure-track teachers are also associated with 0.1 standard deviation worse student performance when their contracts last less than a year.
    Keywords: teachers, labor contracts, students' performance, standardized tests
    JEL: J41 H52
    Date: 2023–08
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp16380&r=hrm
  6. By: Alexander Schiersch; Irene Bertschek; Thomas Niebel
    Abstract: Our paper contributes to the discussion about Europe’s digital sovereignty. We analyze the relationship between firm performance and the diversification of sourcing countries for imported ICT goods. The analysis is based on administrative data for 3888 German manufacturing firms that imported ICT goods in the years 2010 and 2014. We find that firms that diversify the sourcing of ICT goods across multiple countries perform better than similar firms with a less diversified sourcing structure. This result holds for value added as well as for gross operational surplus as performance measures and for two different indicators of diversification.
    Keywords: ICT goods imports, global sourcing, digital sovereignty, firm performance
    JEL: F14 F23 L14 L23 D24
    Date: 2023
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:diw:diwwpp:dp2043&r=hrm

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