1,721,077 research outputs found
Worker Churning and Firms’ Wage Policies
No full textIf a random firm were to increase its wages, would that decrease the firm’s churning (“excessive” worker reallocation)? Although the trade-off between wage and churning costs has received attention in both the labour and HRM literatures, there seems to be no evidence about the causal impact of wages upon churning. This paper seeks to fill that gap by considering detailed Portuguese matched employer-employee panel data and different identification methods. After presenting comprehensive evidence about job and worker flows and churning, we find that even models based on within-firm time differences do still generate the negative association between wages and turnover found in most research. However, that result no longer holds when we consider instrumental variables based on minimum wages determined by collective bargaining arrangements. One possible interpretation of our finding is that workers’ effort may not be sufficiently sensitive to wages: employers may replace workers priced out of the labour market with more skilled individuals, so that churning does not fall.Worker Turnover, Endogeneity, Personnel Economics, Efficiency Wages
The Impact of Pollution on Worker Productivity
No full textEnvironmental protection is typically cast as a tax on the labor market and the economy in general. Since a large body of evidence links pollution with poor health, and health is an important part of human capital, efforts to reduce pollution could plausibly be viewed as an investment in human capital and thus a tool for promoting economic growth. While a handful of studies have documented the impacts of pollution on labor supply, this paper is the first to rigorously assess the less visible but likely more pervasive impacts on worker productivity. In particular, we exploit a novel panel dataset of daily farm worker output as recorded under piece rate contracts merged with data on environmental conditions to relate the plausibly exogenous daily variations in ozone with worker productivity. We find robust evidence that ozone levels well below federal air quality standards have a significant impact on productivity: a 10 ppb decrease in ozone concentrations increases worker productivity by 4.2 percent.
The Good, the Bad and the Average: Evidence on the Scale and Nature of Ability Peer Effects in Schools
No full textIn this paper, we study ability peer effects in secondary schools in England and identify which segments of the peer ability distribution drive the impact of peer quality on students‟ achievements. To do so, we use census data for four cohorts of pupils taking their age-14 national tests, and measure students‟ ability by their prior achievements at age-11. We employ a new identification strategy based on within-pupil regressions that exploit variation in achievements across the three compulsory subjects (English, Mathematics and Science) tested both at age-14 and age-11. We find significant and sizeable negative peer effects arising from bad peers at the very bottom of the ability distribution, but little evidence that average peer quality and very good peers significantly affect pupils‟ academic achievements. However, these results mask some significant heterogeneity along the gender dimension, with girls significantly benefiting from the presence of very academically bright peers, and boys marginally losing out.
Microinsurance, Trust and Economic Development: Evidence from a Randomized Natural Field Experiment
No full textWe report results from a large randomized natural field experiment conducted in southwestern China in the context of insurance for sows. Our study sheds light on two important questions about microinsurance. First, how does access to formal insurance affect farmers' production decisions? Second, what explains the low takeup rate of formal insurance, despite substantial premium subsidy from the government? We find that providing access to formal insurance significantly increases farmers' tendency to raise sows. We argue that this finding also suggests that farmers are not previously insured efficiently through informal mechanisms. We also provide several pieces of evidence suggesting that trust, or lack thereof, for government-sponsored insurance products is a significant barrier for farmers' willingness to participate in the insurance program.
Microinsurance, Trust and Economic Development: Evidence from a Randomized Natural Field Experiment
No full textWe report results from a large randomized natural field experiment conducted in southwestern China in the context of insurance for sows. Our study sheds light on two important questions about microinsurance. First, how does access to formal insurance affect farmers' production decisions? Second, what explains the low takeup rate of formal insurance, despite substantial premium subsidy from the government? We find that providing access to formal insurance significantly increases farmers' tendency to raise sows. We argue that this finding also suggests that farmers are not previously insured efficiently through informal mechanisms. We also provide several pieces of evidence suggesting that trust, or lack thereof, for government-sponsored insurance products is a significant barrier for farmers' willingness to participate in the insurance program.Microinsurance; Trust, Natural Field Experiment
Social Preferences and the Response to Incentives: Evidence from Personnel Data
No full textWe present evidence on whether workers have social preferences by comparing workers・productivity under relative incentives, where individual effort imposes a negative externality on others, to their productivity under piece rates, where it does not. We find that the productivity of the average worker is at least 50 percent higher under piece rates than under relative incentives. We show that this is due to workers partially internalizing the negative externality their effort imposes on others under relative incentives, especially when working alongside their friends. Under piece rates, the relationship among workers does not affect productivity. Further analysis reveals that workers internalize the externality only when they can monitor others and be monitored. This rules out pure altruism as the underlying motive of workers・behavior.
Can a Work Organization Have an Attitude Problem? The Impact of Workplaces on Employee Attitudes and Economic Outcomes
No full textUsing the employee opinion survey responses from several thousand employees working in 193 branches of a major U.S. bank, we consider whether there is a distinctive workplace component to employee attitudes despite the common set of corporate human resource management practices that cover all the branches. Several different empirical tests consistently point to the existence of a systematic branch-specific component to employee attitudes. “Branch effects” can also explain why a significant positive cross-sectional correlation between branch-level employee attitudes and branch sales performance is not observed in longitudinal fixed-effects sales models. The results of our empirical tests concerning the determinants of employee attitudes and the determinants of branch sales are consistent with an interpretation that workplace-specific factors lead to better outcomes for both employees and the bank, and that these factors are more likely to be some aspect of the branches’ internal operations rather than some characteristic of the external market of the branch.
Understanding Individuals' Beliefs.
No full textWe live in a world surrounded by uncertainty and within this uncertainty human beings have to decide every action, every turn of life. When individuals take decisions the true value of parameters relevant for that decision are usually unknown and rarely important ex-ante. The final outcome, realized ex-post, indeed depends on the true parameters, but the decision does not. It usually depends just on the beliefs individuals have about these parameters. The aim of this dissertation is to contribute to a better understanding of the formation of individuals’ beliefs under realistic economic environments. Chapter 1 deals with the information acquisition decisions of individuals who face uncertainty about their own ability. At a theoretical level (Bénabou and Tirole, 2002), it has been shown that overconfident individuals (people with beliefs about themselves higher than reality) with time inconsistent preferences would more often prefer not to know their true ability before performing a certain task. A field experiment in the area of education is designed and implemented confirming the theoretical hypothesis. Chapter 2 explores the dynamics of beliefs with respect to the benefits of the introduction of the single currency (Euro) in Europe. The main result supports the existence of more optimistic beliefs during both the dates of the introduction of the Euro (the non-physical introduction in 1999 and the physical introduction in 2002) with respect to the period before and the period after the implementation. Finally, Chapter 3 explores the determinants of trust in order to better estimate the causal effect of trust on social efficiency. The reverse-causality problem is addressed by introducing an innovative set of instruments for trust from the field of neuroeconomics. The depurated effect is higher than in previous research, emphasizing the relevance of trust in increasing the efficiency of social organizations.
extended family networks in rural mexico: a descriptive analysis ∗ manuela angelucci † giacomo de giorgi ‡ marcos.a.rangel § imran rasul
comparing charitable fundraising schemes: evidence from a natural field experiment and a structural model ¤ steffen huck y imran rasul z andrew shephard
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