Teamwork,monitoring and absence

We present a model showing that firms with interdependent worker productivity (team production) have a higher cost of absence and as a consequence will spend additional resources on monitoring absence. As a result, firms with team production should have lower absence rates, all else equal. Using the Workplace Employment Relations Survey (UK), we are the first to estimate each of these related associations showing that absence has a greater cost in the face of team production, that firms with team production engage in greater monitoring and that firms with team production have reduced absence.     

Does formality improve micro-firm performance? Evidence from the Brazilian SIMPLES program

This paper exploits an extensive Brazilian micro-enterprise survey and the 1996 introduction of a business tax reduction and simplification scheme (SIMPLES) to examine three questions. First, do high tax rates and complex tax regulations really constitute a barrier to the formalization of micro-firms? Second, does formalization improve firm performance measured along several dimensions, including revenues, employment and capital stock? Third, what are the channels through which this occurs? We find that SIMPLES led to a significant increase in formality in several dimensions. Moreover, newly created firms that opt for operating formally show higher levels of revenue and profits, employ more workers and are more capital intensive (only for those firms that have employees). The channel through which this occurs is not access to credit or contracts with larger firms. Rather, it appears that the lower cost of contracting labor leads to adopting production techniques that involve a permanent location and a larger paid labor force.     

Team Incentives and Organizational Form

Conventional wisdom regarding nonprofit firms is that the absence of a profit motive renders them inefficient. However, the costs and product quality realized by profit-taking firms is determined by how well those firms deal with a variety of internal incentive and information problems, and this should be equally true for nonprofits. This article analyzes the team incentive problem in nonprofit organizations. Holmstrom (1982) showed that the introduction of a budget-breaker into a team permitted the creation of incentives to provide efficient effort when it is otherwise impossible. A similar result obtains for a nonprofit team, but the role of principal differs from that found in profit-taking teams. It is shown that any of: donors, government regulators, or Trustees can fulfill this role in a nonprofit team. One implication of this is shown to be that nonprofit firms may indeed pay employees less than otherwise identical employees earn in identical jobs in profit-taking firms.     

Labor matching behavior and trade adjustment

This paper develops a model of costly trade and team production to examine the matching behavior of skilled workers in an open economy. Trade liberalization changes the supply of skilled production teams available for hire, even when firm production techniques remain fixed. As trade barriers fall, some workers choose to quit small firms in order to accept less skill intensive jobs at large firms that participate in foreign markets. Changes in worker matching behavior can explain several stylized features of firm-level adjustments to trade, with effects that are not limited to firms on the margin of exit or exporting. Trade is shown to rationalize the matching behavior of workers, leading to aggregate gains in productivity and lower prices. Openness benefits workers employed at exporting firms, however the likelihood of gaining from trade is not necessarily increasing in skill. Wages in the open economy are tied to both worker skill and job type.     

Non‐wage benefits,costs of turnover and labour attachment

Like firms in established market economies, many Russian firms provide non‐wage benefits to their workers, such as housing, medical care or day care. This article explains the provision of benefits as a strategic choice for firms in the presence of labour and service market imperfections. Analysing unique survey data for 404 industrial establishments from 40 Russian regions, the authors provide strong evidence that non‐wage benefits are used by firms to attach workers and thereby reduce the costs of labour turnover in the face of tight labour markets. It is also shown that this attachment strategy works due to imperfections in the regional markets for social services.     

Teams, Firms and the Evolution of Profit Seeking Behavior

Even as advances in information theory over the last quarter century have cast increasing doubt on the proposition that firms successfully maximize profits, the objective of profit maximization continues to be an axiomatic feature of the neoclassical theory of the firm. This paper attempts to improve our understanding firms by treating the objective function as an open question. Specifically, an ontogenetic thought experiment is undertaken to address the question of what differentiates production teams from firms by asking why team members would sell their control rights to a principal, thereby transforming the team into a firm. What results is an account of the emergence of the objective of profit seeking. Profit seeking emerges endogenously as a more fit alternative than the objective of value maximization, which is less capable of coping with uncertainty through purposive adaptation.     

Rent-Sharing And Wages: Product Demand Or Technology Driven Premia? 1

There is a renewed interest in non-competitive wage determination. Studies have shown that firms share rents with workers. How such rents are appropriated by firms to share, or why firms may wish to do so, is still an area of debate. Using a unique data set, where workers are matched directly to their workplace, we use instrumental variable estimation to examine which shocks create rent-sharing and the size of the rent-sharing effects. The results find rentsharing is strongest for establishments investing in new process technology, and for employers who wish to share their successes with their employees.     

Incentives and the structure of teams

This paper studies the relationship between moral hazard and the matching structure of teams. We show that team incentive problems may generate monotone matching predictions in the absence of complementarities in the production technology. Second, we analyze how complementarity in the underlying technology affects the matching predictions arising due to moral hazard. We find that (i) even when the production technology is strongly complementary, the incentive problem may lead to formation of negatively sorted teams; (ii) as the degree of complementarity increases, the optimal matching structure may switch from positive to negative, solely due to the need to provide incentives.     

Wage/tenure contracts with heterogeneous firms

This paper investigates equilibria where firms post wage/tenure contracts and risk averse workers search for new job opportunities whether employed or unemployed. We generalize previous work by assuming firms have different productivities. Equilibrium implies more productive firms always offer more desirable contracts. Thus workers never quit from more productive firms for less productive firms. Nevertheless turnover is inefficient as employees with long tenures at low productivity firms may reject outside job offers from more productive firms. A worker who quits to a more productive firm may accept a wage cut. Such wage cuts are compensated by faster “promotion” rates to higher wage levels in the future. We also generalize previous arguments by showing equilibria exist where the distribution of offers contains interior mass points and find equilibrium wage/tenure contracts need not be smooth.     

Wage bargaining and turnover costs with heterogenous labor and perfect history screening

We study effects of mobility costs in a model of (Nash) wage bargaining between workers and firms, with instantaneous matching, heterogeneous workers, identical firms and free firm entry, and where firms can screen workers perfectly according to their previous work history but not their actual productivity. We derive the employment level and the minimum worker quality standard, in the market solution, and in the efficient solution established by a social planner. When workers have positive bargaining power, there is always some inefficient unemployment among desired workers in the market solution. The lowest hiring standard chosen by firms is higher than the planner's standard when firing costs are high relative to hiring costs, but may be lower in the opposite case. We show that any higher established hiring standard corresponds to a market equilibrium. The model explains a tendency for a high initial unemployment rate to remain high, particularly for low-skilled workers.     

Unobserved Heterogeneity,Exit Rates,and Re‐Employment Wages

Exit rates from unemployment and re‐employment wages decline over a period of unemployment, after controlling for worker observable characteristics. We study the role of unobserved heterogeneity in an economy with asymmetric information and directed search. We show that the unique equilibrium is separating and that skilled workers have more job opportunities and higher wages. The composition of the unemployed varies with the duration of unemployment, so average exit rates and wages fall with time. The separating equilibrium relies on performance‐related pay schemes and the ability of firms to commit to renting an input that is complementary to worker skills.     

Sequential teamwork in competitive environments: Theory and evidence from swimming data

Many tasks require the input by more than one person very often with members of the team contributing sequentially. However, team production is plagued by disincentive problems. We investigate individual incentives to team production with sequential contributions and competing teams. We show that earlier contributors free-ride on team members contributing later on. We test our predictions on sports data using an athlete's performance in the individual race as a natural control for his relay performance. Our empirical findings strongly support the theoretical claims.     

Taxation of early retirement windows and delaying retirement: The French experience

This paper investigates the effect of the 2003 French pension reform on hiring, firing and employment rates among older workers. This reform increased the mandatory retirement age and simultaneously it set a tax levied on early retirement windows paid by firms to their older workers, to encourage them to leave their job early. We use a matching model with endogenous job destruction extended to account for a mandatory retirement age and we calibrate the model with data drawn from the French Labor Force Surveys for the years 2002 and 2003. We show that in the case of a high tax rate, delaying retirement raises job separation rates, which partially offsets its positive effect on job finding rates. Consequently, the combination of an increase in the retirement age and a taxation on early retirement windows may have negative effects on the employment rate among older workers.     

Microdynamics,granularity and populism: The Finnish case

We study how measures of microdynamics such as job and worker flows, the job reallocation rate and the labor market churning rate are related to populism support. Moreover, we investigate the relation between employment shocks to large firms, granular shocks, and populism. To measure populism, we look at the municipal-level support toward the Finns Party, the Finnish right-wing populist party, during the 2011 and 2015 parliamentary elections. We find that the labor market churning rate and the granular shocks are negatively associated with support for populism. Hirings in continuing establishments are negatively correlated with populism, while hirings due to the entry of new establishments and the job reallocation rate are positively related with populism, a possible consequence of economic restructuring. We complete our analysis by looking at the link between local labor market conditions and the supply of populist candidates, and by examining the usefulness of microdynamics indicators in a predictive setting.     

The Productivity Effects of Worker Mobility Between Heterogeneous Firms

We analyze the effect of worker inflows on establishments’ productivity, using German data. Previous studies for other countries have found positive effects of hiring workers from superior (more productive or higher paying) firms. Ranking establishments by their median wage, we find that inflows from inferior establishments seem to increase hiring establishments’ productivity. Further empirical analyses suggest our findings are due to a positive selection of such inflows from their sending establishments. These workers might have to find a better job match in order to advance their careers, an interpretation supported by the finding that the effect is driven by workers with short tenure at their previous employer. Our findings reflect the increasingly assortative pattern of worker mobility in Germany found in a related strand of literature.     

Competition between Employed and Unemployed Job Applicants: Swedish Evidence*

We use the Swedish Applicant Database to investigate empirically whether being unemployed per se reduces the probability of getting contacted by a firm. All searchers looking for a new job are invited to submit their personal details to this database over the internet. Since we have access to exactly the same information as the firms, we can minimize the problems associated with unobserved heterogeneity. Our results show that an unemployed applicant faces a lower contact probability than an otherwise identical employed applicant, thus supporting the notion that firms view employment status as a signal of productivity.     

Information, bilateral negotiations, and worker recruitment

This paper studies experimentally how firms choose between using a centralized market and bilateral negotiations to recruit new personnel. In the market firms interact with several workers but do not have information about workers’ behavior in the past. In the bilateral negotiations firms negotiate bilaterally with prospective workers and learn about workers’ performance in previous jobs. We show that the interaction between social preferences, the incompleteness of contracts and the existence of information about a worker’s past performance provides an explanation for firms forgoing market opportunities and bilaterally negotiating with a worker. We observe that approximately 30% of all job contracts were bilaterally negotiated when these contracts are incomplete as opposed to only 10% when contracts were complete. The surplus from trade is higher when incomplete contracts can be bilaterally negotiated, which can be attributed to the presence of information.     

Teams take the better risks

One reason why decision makers are often teams and not individuals may be that team decisions comply more closely with economic rationality. We compare individual and team decisions, when systematic deviations from the expected utility theory (EUT) and the portfolio selection theory (PST) are to be expected. We find almost no evidence for the greater compliance of team decisions with the principles of EUT. However, there is substantial evidence for the consistency of team decisions with the PST. Compared to individuals, teams accumulate significantly more expected value at a significantly lower total risk (measured in standard deviation, S.D.).     

论虚拟团队中的领导能力及其内涵的重新定位

对于分散的虚拟团队来说，可以发现在团队生命期内领导者的角色会在不同的时期由不同的团队成员扮演。研究虚拟团队旨在研究团队成员不同的任务和领导者、技术在虚拟团队中所发挥的作用。虚拟团队的形成可为领导能力的重新定义提供特殊的环境。     

Soccer transfers,team efficiency and the sports cycle in the most valued European soccer leagues – have European soccer teams been efficient in trading players?

The sale of soccer players is a serious issue for the sustainability of professional teams. This article discusses the efficiency of the values that 183 European soccer teams have received for the sales of their players since 2007. We estimated stochastic frontiers for these soccer teams using stochastic frontier analysis. We found that teams with higher numbers of titles, with huge past acquisitions of players, and achieving good rankings in the previous season tend to receive more transfer inflows. The efficiency of these inflows can be significantly influenced if the team exhibits a long sports history or if the team participates in the Champions League or in the Europa League.