Behavioral and personnel economics

Articles in behavioral economics discuss the emotional and cognitive factors that influence the decisions of actors, in particular employers and employees. Personnel economics analyzes the internal organizational strategy of the firm and the human resource management practices chosen to pursue that strategy.

  • Working-time autonomy as a management practice

    Giving workers control over their working hours increases their commitment and benefits firm performance

    Michael Beckmann, January 2016
    Allowing workers to control their work hours (working-time autonomy) is a controversial policy for worker empowerment, with concerns that range from increased shirking to excessive intensification of work. Empirical evidence, however, supports neither view. Recent studies find that working-time autonomy improves individual and firm performance without promoting overload or exhaustion from work. However, if working-time autonomy is incorporated into a system of family-friendly workplace practices, firms may benefit from the trade-off between (more) fringe benefits and (lower) wages but not from increased productivity.
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  • Working in family firms

    Family firms offer higher job security but lower wages than other firms

    Thomas Breda, April 2018
    Family firms are ubiquitous in most countries. The differences in objectives, governance, and management styles between those firms and their non-family counterparts have several implications for the workforce, which scholars have only recently started to investigate. Family firms offer greater job security, employ different management practices, have a comparative advantage to avoid conflicts when employment relations are more hostile, and provide insurance to workers through implicit contracts when labor market regulation is limited. But all this also comes at a cost.
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  • Who benefits from firm-sponsored training? Updated

    Firm-sponsored training benefits both workers and firms through higher wages, increased productivity and innovation

    Benoit Dostie, July 2020
    Workers participating in firm-sponsored training receive higher wages as a result. But given that firms pay the majority of costs for training, shouldn’t they also benefit? Empirical evidence shows that this is in fact the case. Firm-sponsored training leads to higher productivity levels and increased innovation, both of which benefit the firm. Training can also be complementary to, and enhance, other types of firm investment, particularly in physical capital, such as information and communication technology (ICT), and in organizational capital, such as the implementation of high-performance workplace practices.
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  • What makes a good job? Job quality and job satisfaction

    Job satisfaction is important to well-being, but intervention may be needed only if markets are impeded from improving job quality

    Andrew E. Clark, December 2015
    Many measures of job satisfaction have been trending downward. Because jobs are a key part of most people’s lives, knowing what makes a good job (job quality) is vital to knowing how well society is doing. Integral to worker well-being, job quality also affects the labor market through related decisions on whether to work, whether to quit, and how much effort to put into a job. Empirical work on what constitutes a good job finds that workers value more than wages; they also value job security and interest in their work. Policy to affect job quality requires information on the cost of the different aspects of job quality and how much workers value them.
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  • Unemployment and happiness

    Successful policies for helping the unemployed need to confront the adverse effects of unemployment on feelings of life satisfaction

    Rainer Winkelmann, October 2014
    Many studies document a large negative effect of unemployment on happiness. Recent research has looked into factors related to impacts on happiness, such as adaptation, social work norms, social capital, religious beliefs, and psychological resources. Getting unemployed people back to work can do more for their happiness than compensating them for doing nothing. But not all unemployed people are equally unhappy. Understanding the differences holds the key to designing effective policies, for helping the unemployed back into work, and for more evenly distributing the burden of unemployment resulting from economic restructuring.
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  • Trust in management in organizations

    Employee trust in their managers allows a firm to delegate decision-making, aiding both productivity and profitability

    It is not possible for a formal employment contract to detail everything an employee should do and when. Informal relationships, in particular trust, allow managers to arrange a business in a more productive way; high-trust firms are both more profitable and faster growing. For example, if they are trusted, managers can delegate decisions to employees with confidence that employees will believe the promised rewards. This is important because employees are often better informed than their bosses. Consequently, firms that rely solely on formal contracts will miss profitable opportunities.
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  • The value of hiring through employee referrals in developed countries

    Firms can benefit by hiring employee referred candidates; however, there are potential drawbacks that must be considered

    Mitchell Hoffman, June 2017
    Companies frequently hire new employees based on referrals from existing employees, who often recommend friends or family members. There are numerous possible benefits from this, such as lower turnover, possibly higher productivity, lower recruiting costs, and beneficial commonalities related to shared employee values. On the other hand, hiring through employee referrals may disadvantage under-represented minorities, entail greater firm costs in the form of higher wages, lead to undesirable commonalities, and reflect nepotism. A growing body of research explores these considerations.
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  • The pros and cons of workplace tournaments

    Tournaments can outperform other compensation schemes such as piece-rate and fixed wage contracts

    Roman M. Sheremeta, October 2016
    Tournaments are commonly used in the workplace to determine promotion, assign bonuses, and motivate personal development. Tournament-based contracts can be very effective in eliciting high effort, often outperforming other compensation contracts, but they can also have negative consequences for both managers and workers. The benefits and disadvantages of workplace tournaments have been identified in an explosion of theoretical, empirical, and experimental research over the past 30 years. Based on these findings, suggestions and guidelines can be provided for when it might be beneficial to use tournaments in the workplace.
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