Author: Francisco Miguel Garcia Gonçalves de LimaPublisher:
ISBN: 9789728296810
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 114
Book Description
Essays on personnel economics
Author: Francisco Miguel Garcia Gonçalves de LimaPublisher:
ISBN: 9789728296810
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 114
Book Description
Essays on Personnel Economics
Author: Emre EkinciPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 196
Book Description
This dissertation is a collection of three essays on personnel economics. The first essay studies bonus payments in a hierarchical firm. A well-documented finding in the internal labor markets literature is that the size of bonus payments increases as one moves up the corporate ladder. Two existing theories that can be used to explain this finding cannot fully capture the empirical patterns of the size of bonus payments. I develop a unified framework that can better match the empirical findings. Using a dynamic tournament model augmented with an asymmetric learning structure in which the current employer has an informational advantage over its competitors regarding the worker's productivity, my model offers an economic rationale for the employer's decision on the size of bonus payments by identifying two counteracting mechanisms that determine bonuses. Specifically, the size of bonus payments increases with the level of effort the employer aims to induce, but decreases with the size of the worker's career-concern incentives. I test the model's predictions using data from the personnel records of a medium-sized firm in the financial services industry. The results provide direct evidence for the model's predictions. The second essay investigates how salaries and bonus payments are related to turnover. In contrast with the existing literature, this study treats bonus payments as a distinct type of compensation, rather than aggregating them with salaries. The first part of the empirical analysis focuses on data coming from the personnel records of a medium-sized U.S. firm. I find that earning a bonus in the current period, as well as the size of the bonus, is negatively related to the probability of turnover after controlling for the size of salary or the growth rate of salary. These results also indicate that the growth rate of salary is negatively related to turnover, while results concerning the effect of the size of salaries are mixed. The second part of the empirical analysis uses a sample drawn from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). The results show that salary, both in terms of size and growth rate, has a negative effect on the probabilities of quits and layoffs; whereas the negative effect of bonus payments is more evident in layoffs than quits. This third essay examines conditions under which employee referrals serve a screening function. Unlike the existing theoretical work, the possibility of a conflict of interest arising between the firm and current employees during the referral process is investigated. I consider two potential mechanisms that lead to a conflict of interest. First, I examine how the employee's social connections relate to his referral decision. I show that the employee finds it optimal to refer applicants with whom he has a strong social connection rather than applicants of high ability. Second, I examine how the employee's promotion prospects affect his referral decisions. Specifically, I posit that the current employee will have incentives to refer an applicant of lower ability if he faces any possibility of competition for promotions between himself and the newly hired worker. In either of these situations, employee referrals may not provide screening of more able workers. Finally, I show that the firm can make use of referral bonuses, which are contingent on the referral's performance, to align incentives of the employee with those of the firm.
Essays in Labor and Personnel Economics
Author: Benjamin Uwe Rolf FriedrichPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 356
Book Description
Essays in Personnel Economics
Author: Dana Lynn SamuelsonThree Essays in Personnel Economics
Author: David Jonathan BrlanPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 206
Book Description
Three Essays on Personnel Economics
Author: Sacha KapoorPublisher:
ISBN: 9780494782323
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 258
Book Description
My dissertation focuses on the role of incentives in the workplace. In Chapter 1, I study peer effects in pay-for-individual-performance jobs. Specifically, I explore whether, how, and why coworker performance matters when rewards are based on individual performance. When teamed with high-performing peers, I find that workers are more productive overall. I also find that workers who resign are unaffected by coworker performance in the period after they hand in their resignation notice. The findings suggest peer effects in pay-for-individual-performance jobs reflect reputational concerns about relative performance rather than competitive preferences.In Chapter 2, I present field evidence that sheds new light on incentive provision in multitask jobs. Specifically, I design and conduct a field experiment at a large-scale restaurant, where the pre-existing wage contract encourages workers to carry out their tasks in a way that is not perfectly aligned with the firm's preferences. The experimental treatment pays bonuses to waiters for the number of customers they serve, in addition to their tips for customer service and hourly wages. I compare worker performance under the treatment to that under the pre-existing contract, where workers are rewarded for overemphasizing customer service, to evaluate the effect of a wage contract that encourages undesirable behavior. I find that the average worker earns more, is more productive, and generates higher short-run profits for the firm when paid bonuses for customer volume. Overall, the findings suggest that sharpening wage contracts to deal with incentive problems in multitask jobs has benefits for workers as well as the firm.In Chapter 3, I present joint work (with Arvind N. Magesan at the University of Calgary) on the beauty premium's role in the workplace. Specifically, we investigate whether, how, and why the beauty premium can be explained by the behaviour of workers after they are hired. We find that attractive workers earn more because they transfer effort from tasks that reward looks to tasks that reward effort. We also provide evidence against favorable treatment by customers and the employer as sources for the beauty premium. We conclude that the premium is largely driven by the worker's on-the-job behavior.
Essays in Organizational and Personnel Economics
Author: Holger HerzEssays on Behavioural and Personnel Economics
Author: Levent YilmazHuman Resource Economics and Public Policy
Author: Charles J. WhalenPublisher: W.E. Upjohn Institute
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 317
Book Description
This book honors Vernon Briggs's professional contributions. This book contains important discussions on issues of human resource economics, which is now often described as workforce development. This book offers much research information and policy analysis that can be used to develop what is needed for an active set of national human resource policies.
Essays on Personnel Economics in Low-Income Countries
Author: Christina L. BrownPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
A key question in personnel economics is how best to motivate and incentivize workers. In this dissertation, I investigate how different incentive systems affect workers' effort and decision on where to work. Rewarding different aspects of workers' performance may allow firms to prioritize certain outcomes and may attract and retain different types of employees who are more or less drawn to particular contracts. Finally, certain incentive schemes may benefit or harm certain sub-groups of employees, especially when there is subjectivity introduced into the evaluation scheme.In the first chapter, joint with Tahir Andrabi, we study whether performance incentives lead to sorting of teachers. Attracting and retaining high-quality teachers has a large social benefit, but it is challenging for schools to identify good teachers ex-ante. We use teachers' contract choices and a randomized controlled trial of performance pay with 7,000 teachers in 243 private schools in Pakistan to study whether performance pay affects the composition of teachers. Consistent with adverse selection models, we find that performance pay induces positive sorting: both among teachers with higher latent ability and among those with a more elastic effort response to incentives. Teachers also have better information about these dimensions of type than their principals. Using two additional treatments, we show effects are more pronounced among teachers with better information about their quality and teachers with lower switching costs. Accounting for these sorting effects, the total effect of performance pay on test scores is twice as large as the direct effect on the existing stock of teachers, suggesting that analyses that ignore sorting effects may substantially understate the effects of performance pay.In the second chapter, joint with Tahir Andrabi, we investigate how different types of incentive pay affect employee behavior. A central challenge facing schools is how to incentivize teachers. While high-powered incentives can motivate effort, they can lead teachers to distort effort away from non-incentivized outcomes. This is one reason why most performance incentives allow for manager subjectivity. However, this subjectivity can introduce new concerns, including favoritism and bias. We study the effect of subjective versus objective performance incentives on teacher productivity using the same randomized controlled trial discussed in chapter 1. We estimate the effect of two performance raise treatments versus a control condition, in which all teachers receive the same raise. The first treatment arm is a "subjective" raise, in which principals evaluate teachers; the second treatment arm an "objective" raise based on student test scores. First, we show that both subjective and objective incentives are equally effective at increasing test scores. However, objective incentives decrease student socio-emotional development. Second, we show that these effects are likely driven by the types of behavior change we observe from teachers during classroom observations. In objective schools, teachers spend more time on test preparation and use more punitive discipline, whereas, in subjective schools, pedagogy improves. Finally, we investigate the mechanisms of these effects through the lens of a moral hazard model with multi-tasking. We exploit variation within each treatment to isolate the causal effect of contract noisiness and distortion on student outcomes. We then show that teachers perceive subjective incentives as less noisy and less distorted, and these contract features affect student outcomes, serving as key channels to explain the reduced form effects we see.Finally, in the third chapter, I explore whether managers show gender bias in their evaluation of employees, and, if so, under what circumstances. Pakistan ranks in the lowest decile in female labor force participation, and even in sectors where women are more prevalent, such as teaching, they earn 70 cents for each dollar men earn. In this chapter, I test the extent to which statistical versus financial discrimination explains these pay gaps. I use the experiment from chapter 1 and 2, which has two important random variations: i). how often managers observe a given employee and ii). whether manager evaluations affect employee's pay or are just used for feedback and see whether this changes how managers evaluate their employees. I find that managers have less gender bias the more frequently they observe a given employee and more gender bias if there is a financial stake of the manager's evaluation. While all three chapters use the same randomization design and data, each chapter is intended to be a stand-alone set of research questions, so the respective design and data description is included within each chapter.