Hierarchical Careers

A model of hierarchical careers that integrates the career concerns of workers and the production concerns of firms is presented. The model generates standard supply side age earnings profiles. It also explains intermittent career events such as promotions, quits, layoffs, lateral mobility, and early retirement. The model is also able to explain several labor market institutions such as fast track jobs, up or out rules, internal labor markets, primary and secondary jobs, and insider/outsider labor markets.     

The relationship between works councils and firms’ further training provision in times of technological change

Participating in further training is strategically important for employees to ensure their employability. Particularly for employees in low-skilled jobs, works councils — firm-level organizations that represent employees — constitute an important employee advocacy instrument in European countries, such as France and Germany. With comprehensive co-determination rights, works councils can influence firms’ hiring policies, job design and career paths (e.g. promotions). Using German firm-level data, we empirically investigate the influence of works councils on firms’ training provision for employees in firms below and above the industry level of technology. The results show that works councils have a positive effect on the percentage of employees in general, and of employees in low-skilled jobs in particular, participating in training, but only for firms below the industry level of technology. These results show the importance of works councils in supporting training in such firms and enhancing the employment prospects of employees in low-skilled jobs. In contrast, firms above the industry level of technology invest in training with or without a works council, indicating that the training interests of employers and employees are aligned.     

Capital investment and employment in the information sector

Estimation of the employment effects of changes in capital investment is a standard tool in public policy debates. Typically, such predictions are based on employment multipliers derived from Input–Output analysis. In this paper, we measure the employment effects of changes in capital investment in the U.S. information sector by econometrically estimating an “employment multiplier” from historical data. The estimated multiplier is 10 information sector jobs for each million dollars in expenditure, and perhaps 24 new jobs per million dollars invested across the entire economy. Employment multipliers derived from the Input–Output methodology average about 16 jobs per million, but the multiplier includes jobs outside the information sector. Including employment spillovers, our estimates suggest the multipliers from Input–Output models are plausible. We also note that information sector jobs have substantially higher median earnings than the private sector average, so the economic significance of changes in information sector employment are greater than might first appear. Our findings may be useful in debates over changes in industry regulation that could affect investment.     

Let them go? How losing employees to competitors can enhance firm status

Research summary : Because employees can provide a firm with human capital advantages over competitors, firms invest considerably in employee recruiting and retention. Departing from the retention imperative of strategic human capital management, we propose that certain employee departures can enhance a firm's competitiveness in the labor market. Specifically, increased rates of career‐advancing departures by a firm's employees can signal to potential future employees that the firm offers a prestigious employment experience that enhances external mobility opportunities. Characterizing advancement based on subsequent employers and positions, we analyze data on U.S. law firm hiring and industry surveys of perceived firm status between 2004 and 2013. We find that increased rates of employee departures lead to increases in a firm's prestige when these departures are for promotions with high‐status competitors. Managerial summary : Firms often emphasize employee retention. Employee departures, especially as a result of being hired away by competitors, are often viewed as threats to a firm's competitive advantage. We propose, however, that employee retention need not be an unconditional strategic imperative. We argue that certain employee departures can enhance a firm's competitiveness in the market for human capital by signaling to potential employees that the firm offers a prestigious employment experience, which can help them obtain attractive positions with other employers. Analyzing data on U.S. law firm hiring and industry surveys of firm associates between 2004 and 2013, we find that increased rates of employee departures lead to increases in a firm's prestige when these departures are for promotions with high‐status competitors. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

四维度视角下新生代大学生职业生涯规划现状与影响因素实证研究——基于对181名应届大学毕业生的调查

基于181份新生代应届高校毕业生的有效问卷,在对调查过程与现状描述基础上,基于自我认知、职业认知、战略规划和计划实施四个维度对新生代大学生职业生涯规划影响因素进行实证研究.研究结论认为：高达59.67％的新生代高校毕业生存在职业选择或职业发展困惑,对学校开展的职业生涯教育整体不太满意;虽然新生代高校毕业生职业生涯规划在性别、生源地、学生干部、专业、父母文化程度5个方面均未呈现显著性差异,但具体维度得分有较大差异.针对这些新发现,文章对其可能的深层次原因进行探讨,并有针对性地提出对策建议.     

Employers' Search and the Efficiency of Matching

Unskilled workers in low productivity jobs typically experience higher labour turnover. This article shows how this finding is related to variation in the efficiency of the matching process across occupations. If employers find it less profitable to invest in search and screening activities when recruiting for low‐productivity jobs, matches at the lower end of the occupation distribution will be more prone to separation. The analysis of a unique sample of British hirings, containing detailed information about employers' recruitment practices, shows that more intensive recruitment leads to matches of better quality that pay higher wages, last longer and make employers more satisfied with the person taken on.     

Collective Voice under Decentralized Bargaining: A Comparative Study of Work Reorganization in US and German Call Centres

This article compares the process of and outcomes from work reorganization in US and German call centres, based on four matched case studies in the telecommunications industry. Both German cases adopted high‐involvement employment systems with broad skills and worker discretion, while the US cases relied on a narrow division of labour, tight discipline and individual incentives. These outcomes are explained by differences in institutional supports for collective voice. Works councils in the German companies used their stronger participation rights to limit monitoring and encourage upskilling at a time when US managers were rationalizing similar jobs. Findings demonstrate that industrial relations institutions can have a substantial influence on employment systems in work settings characterized by decentralized bargaining and strong cost pressures.     

A model for relating technology, organization and employment level: A study of the impact of computerization in the Swedish insurance industry

This article investigates effects of computerization in the Swedish insurance industry from 1960–1980. While the technological imperative dictates that many jobs would disappear, it was found that employment actually increased. The authors produce a model relating technology to employment levels and suggest that a range of moderating factors must be considered.     

Designing sales force satisfying selling positions: a conjoint measurement approach

To design selling positions that appeal to both new and incumbent salespersons, management needs to understand salespersons' preferences for job characteristics. The study reported here exemplifies an effort to operationalize salespersons' preferences for job and task characteristics that takes account of both career stage and gender. Findings indicate that salespeople in the sample prefer salary-based compensation and that female salespeople prefer sales jobs that are fixed in location.     

Workers' Views of the Impact of Trade on Jobs

This article uses new data to examine how workers' perceptions of the impact of trade on jobs like theirs are related to economic variables representing their career paths, job characteristics, and local labor market conditions. We find that only 17 percent of workers think trade creates jobs. And even fewer workers (4–7 percent) in any industry think trade has created better jobs. We find that workers' perceptions do not reflect their job characteristics or the movability of their jobs. Their perceptions of trade primarily reflect local labor market conditions (hiring and separation rates) and education. The determinants of workers' perceptions of trade present a different pattern compared with their perceptions of job security.     

Older Married Workers and Nonstandard Jobs: The Effects of Health and Health Insurance

We examine the effects of health and health insurance coverage on older married workers' decisions to work in temporary, contract, part-time, self-employment, and regular full-time jobs. We model the behavior of older married workers as interdependent, showing that one spouse's health and insurance status affects the employment of the other. In general, we find that men and women are less likely to be employed in regular full-time jobs when they are in fair or poor health and are more likely to be in regular full-time employment when their spouses are in poor health.     

U.S. Multinational Activity Abroad and U.S. Jobs: Substitutes or Complements?

Critics of globalization claim that firms are being driven by the prospects of cheaper labor and lower labor standards to shift employment abroad. Yet the evidence, beyond anecdotes, is slim. This paper reports stylized facts on the activities of U.S. multinationals at home and abroad for the years 1977 to 1999. We focus on firms in manufacturing and services, two sectors that have received extensive media attention for supposedly exporting jobs. Using firm‐level data collected by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) in Washington, D.C., we report correlations between U.S. multinational employment at home and abroad. Preliminary evidence based on the operations of these multinationals suggests that the sign of the correlation depends on the crucial distinction between affiliates in high‐income and low‐income countries. For affiliates in high‐income countries there is a positive correlation between jobs at home and abroad, suggesting that foreign employment of U.S. multinationals is complementary to domestic employment. For firms that operate in developing countries, employment has been cut in the United States, and affiliate employment has increased. To account for firm size, substitution across firms and entry and exit, we aggregate our data to the industry level. This exercise reveals that the observed “complementarity” between U.S. and foreign jobs has been driven largely by a contraction across all manufacturing sectors. It also reveals that foreign employment in developing countries has substituted for U.S. employment in several highly visible industries, including computers, electronics, and transportation. The fact that there were U.S. jobs lost to foreign affiliates in key sectors, despite broad complementarity in hiring and firing decisions between U.S. parents and their affiliates, helps explain why economists view the impact of globalization on U.S. jobs as benign despite negative news coverage for declining industries.     

Methodology in the "Job Quality" Debate

This paper critically examines the use of the earnings distribution of net employment gains in the analysis of "new jobs." The paper explains why this measure of economic performance is not robust and why it can be misleading. Alternative analyses, based on industry and/or accupation, are more robust and may be more informative. Illustrative results show that the new job growth has been concentrated in industries with generally lower wages than the industries where jobs have been lost.     

The Financial Costs of Caring in the British Labour Market: Is There a Wage Penalty for Workers in Caring Occupations?

Recent evidence from the USA suggests that people engaged in occupations involving providing care for others, such as childcare and teaching, suffer a wage penalty. After taking into account job and individual characteristics such as level of education and work experience, people in these occupations in the American study earned about 6 per cent less than their peers in other types of occupation. However, we do not yet know if people working in similar occupations in other countries also suffer the same degree of disadvantage. The issue is important because, despite the perception that people in caring jobs place a relatively low weight on the level of remuneration when making career decisions, a number of studies have shown clear evidence of an association between pay and the propensity to give up working in a caring occupation. There are implications too for social inequality as many caring jobs are done by women and associated wage penalties could contribute to the persistent gender gap in pay. This study compares and contrasts the predictions of neoclassical economics, cultural feminist theory and social closure theory. Data are taken from 17 waves of the British Household Panel Survey and include a total of 23,773 individuals, giving 110,677 person‐year observations. These data are analysed using multi‐level linear regression. The results show clear evidence of a statistically significant wage penalty associated with working in some caring occupations. Those occupations requiring lower levels of educational qualification, such as nursing assistants and auxiliaries, are particularly hard‐hit by the wage penalty. On the other hand, some occupations, such as medicine and teaching, have fared better than comparable non‐caring occupations over the same period. We discuss the implications of these results for the gender gap in pay, poverty, social inequality and the future supply of caring workers.     

Early Retirement and Bridge Employment Intentions Among Older Workers in Singapore

This paper examined the relevance of 14 demographic, cognitive, and affective factors in individuals' intentions to voluntarily retire early and to secure bridge employment after retirement. Results based on a sample of 361 respondents aged between 40 and 59 suggested that marital status, perceived negative age-health relationship, gender psychological readiness for retirement, and family orientation were related to early retirement intentions. Work centrality, perceived organisational attitude towards older employees, and psychological readiness for early retirement were related to bridge employment intentions. Implications for research were discussed.     

Minimizing Competition? Entry-Level Compensation in Japanese Firms

This is the first empirical study of the determinants of pay for entry-level jobs among Japanese firms. Pay data of 1,382 companies obtained from the Nikkei survey was matched with company size, performance, industry, and foreign ownership data from Toyo Keizai's Japan Company Handbook. I found that unlike the results based on U.S. data, company size is not related to entry-level pay. Firm performance is positively related, but its effect is minimal. Industry membership and foreign ownership are related. I believe that these findings highlight the influence of the Japanese employment context and information sharing in Japan. Implications for research and practice are discussed.     

Dualism in Part-Time Employment

This paper draws on open-ended interviews of managers to characterize two distinct types of part-time employment in service industries. "Secondary" part-time employment displays the typical characteristics of a secondary labor market; "retention" part-time jobs are primary labor market jobs. Some predictions of this model are tested on Current Population Survey data.     

How information and communication technology drives (routine and non-routine) jobs: Structural path and decomposition analysis for China

A comprehensive exploration into the routine/non-routine job implications of information and communication technology (ICT) is crucial for tackling routine-replacing technological change challenges in the digital era. To this end, we propose an integrated input-output (IO) analytical framework to detangle the intertwined relations between ICT and non-ICT sectors, and further incorporate structural path analysis (SPA) and structural decomposition analysis (SDA) to examine the extent to which and how ICT sub-sectors drive the formations and changes of embodied routine/non-routine jobs in ICT. An empirical study using China's national IO tables from World Input-Output Database and the matched occupational employment data derived from 2000 and 2010 Population Census is conducted. We find that China's ICT growth over 2000–2010 has not led to a decline in jobs, which still holds true for both ICT manufacturing and ICT service, as well as for routine/non-routine jobs. We also find an increase in the embodied employment share of non-routine relative to routine jobs. The typical paths “source sector → (intermediate sector) → ICT final demand” generate many routine/non-routine jobs, which are primarily lied in the zero and first rounds. The decomposition results show that the declining sectoral routine/non-routine job coefficients drives the decline of both ICT embodied routine and non-routine jobs (especially the former), which is completely offset by the rising final demand of ICT. The proposed integrated IO analytical framework could also be applied to other indicators and extended to multi-country/region analysis.     

Gender Differences in Involuntary Job Loss: Why Are Men More Likely to Lose Their Jobs?

Empirical studies have consistently reported that rates of involuntary job loss are significantly lower among female employees than among males. Only rarely, however, have the reasons for this differential been the subject of detailed investigation. In this article, household panel survey data from Australia are used that also find higher rates of job loss among men than among women. This differential, however, largely disappears once controls for industry and occupation are included. These findings suggest that the observed gender differential primarily reflects systematic differences in the types of jobs into which men and women select.     

The accentuated CEO career horizon problem: evidence from international acquisitions

We develop a conceptual model of the career horizon problem of CEOs approaching retirement and discuss its implications on firm risk taking, specifically in engagement in international acquisitions. Based on prospect theory and agency theory, we emphasize the legacy conservation and wealth preservation concerns of CEOs and investigate how their holdings of in‐the‐money unexercised options and firm equity accentuate or mitigate the career horizon problem. The model is tested in the context of international acquisitions with a sample of 293 U.S. firms over a five‐year period (1995–1999). We find that a longer CEO career horizon is associated with a higher likelihood of international acquisitions. We also find that CEOs nearing retirement with high levels of in‐the‐money unexercised options and equity holdings are less likely to engage in international acquisitions than CEOs with low levels of in‐the‐money options and equity holdings. The study raises important considerations about the implications of CEOs' equity and in‐the‐money option holdings on firm risk taking at various stages of their career horizon. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.