Poaching and Firm‐Sponsored Training

A series of seminal papers argues that poaching hampers company‐sponsored general training. Empirically, however, the existence and extent of poaching remain open questions. We provide a novel empirical strategy to identify poaching. We find that only few apprenticeship training firms in Germany are ‘poaching victims’ or ‘poaching raiders’. Victims are more likely to be in a temporary downturn and raiders are more likely to be growing. Victims hardly change their training strategy after poaching and poaching seems be a transitory event. This is an important result for countries that intend to introduce apprenticeship‐type training and need to convince firms to participate in training.     

When a Door Closes,a Window Opens? Long‐Term Labor Market Effects of Involuntary Separations

This study estimates the earning losses of workers experiencing an involuntary job separation. We employ, for the first time in the earning losses literature, a Poisson pseudo‐maximum‐likelihood estimator with fixed effects that has several advantages with respect to conventional fixed effects models. The Poisson estimator allows considering the full set of involuntary separations, including those with zero labor market earnings because of unemployment. By including individuals with zero earnings and by using our new method, the loss in the year of separation becomes larger than in previous studies. The loss starts with roughly 30% and, although it quickly shrinks, it remains at around 15% in the following years. In addition, we find that compared to other reasons for separation, the earning loss pattern is unique for involuntary separations, because no other type of separation implies such permanent scarring. This latter finding makes us confident that the self‐reported involuntariness of a separation is a reliable source of information.     

Water mollusc communities and bioindication of lower salzach floodplain waters

The lower Salzach River lost its natural river dynamics as a result of channelization, which caused its bed to deepen, its groundwater table to be lowered, and its floodplains to gradually dry out. These changes of the floodplain have lead to a loss of natural biotopes with their biocoenoses. By using water mollusc communities as bioindicators these losses are detectable at a landscape level. A numerical analysis of a water mollusc survey in 1989 defined six water mollusc communities identifying six water-body types: three flowing (streams, ditches, and rivers) and three standing (young former meanders, large deep groundwater-influenced backwaters and small shallow groundwater-influenced backwaters) within the lower Salzach valley. These communities and water-body types are interpreted using results from water mollusc communities of other floodplain systems and by comparison with earlier water mollusc surveys in the lower Salzach valley. Then predictions are made on the future fate of the investigated floodplain water. Finally the investigated water bodies are evaluated for nature conservation in the face of plans to impound the lower Salzach River.     

Positive effects of ageing and age diversity in innovative companies – large‐scale empirical evidence on company productivity

This article investigates how age diversity within a company's workforce affects company productivity. It introduces a theoretical framework that helps integrate results from a broad disciplinary spectrum of ageing and diversity research to derive empirically testable hypotheses on the effects of age diversity on company productivity. It argues that first the balance between costs and benefits of diversity determines the effect of age diversity on company productivity, and that second the type of task performed acts as a moderator. To test these hypotheses, it uses a large‐scale employer–employee panel data set. Results show that increasing age diversity has a positive effect on company productivity if and only if a company engages in creative rather than routine tasks.     

Entrepreneurial Signaling via Education: A Success Factor in Innovative Start-Ups

Unlike traditional start-ups, innovative start-ups and their respective market partners are faced with severe problems of asymmetric information due to their lack of prior production history and reputation. Here, we study whether and how entrepreneurial signaling via education can help innovative entrepreneurs signal their abilities to banks and prospective employees. We argue that innovative entrepreneurs signal their quality by means of certain characteristics of their educational history. In particular, we expect potential employees to use an entrepreneur’s university degree as a quality signal when deciding whether to accept a job at an innovative start-up, and we expect banks to use a more precise indicator, namely the actual length of study in relation to a standard length, as a signal when deciding to extend credit to an innovative founder. By contrast, traditional start-ups are not faced with the same problems of asymmetric information, so we do not expect employees or banks to require the same signals from them. We empirically test our hypotheses using a dataset of more than 700 German start-ups collected in 1998/99. All hypotheses are borne out by the data.     

Codetermination and personnel policies of German firms: the influence of works councils on turnover and further training

The paper analyses the contribution of works councils to the overall success of German firms during the last few decades. It is argued that a successful implementation of flexible specialization strategies is the cornerstone of German prosperity. The acquisition and effective utilization of firm-specific skills is a precondition of successful flexible specialization. Effective skill utilization itself needs cooperation between employers and employees in order to safeguard the specific investments of either side. Thus, the crucial question is whether the dual system of worker representation in Germany, and particularly the part of the works councils therein, is an efficient institution in the sense that it guarantees the necessary co-operation. In analysing the effects of works councils on personnel turnover and vocational training, we find the works councils to be organizationally efficient, i.e., they balance out employers' and employees' interests. The legal structure underlying the dual system is found to be institutionally efficient because it guarantees this result. Even in times of crisis and if exposed to great pressure, the dual system seems to remain stable, as is illustrated in the light of recent labour market developments that have been triggered by German unification and the last recession.     

Tournament Compensation Systems,Employee Heterogeneity,and Firm Performance

Tournament compensation systems are widely used in practice and have been extensively analyzed theoretically. However, one major problem has hardly been studied in a company context so far: Although it is theoretically well understood that tournament compensation systems are only effective when employees are homogeneous, it has rarely been analyzed what companies can do when they are confronted with employee heterogeneity. In our article, we derive hypotheses on the performance effects of tournament compensation systems in a context of employee heterogeneity based on tournament and expectancy theory. Using personnel records from incentive travel contests, we are able to show that performance is lower in a situation with employee heterogeneity, but that in heterogeneous tournaments, incentives may still work for a subgroup of employees whom we term the “threshold group.” In addition, we also show how companies manage to design the information disclosure systems necessary to install effective “handicapping” or “league‐building” systems in order to increase the effort‐performance expectancy.     

Occupational Stereotypes and Gender‐Specific Job Satisfaction

Using representative data containing information on job satisfaction and workers’ gender‐specific prejudices, we investigate the relationship between stereotyping and job satisfaction. We show that women in stereotypically male jobs are significantly less satisfied with their work climate and job content than in stereotypically female jobs but more satisfied with their income in those same jobs. Our findings indicate that women trade off their higher income satisfaction against the negative consequences of stereotyping. As long as we take into account that stereotypically male jobs are physically more demanding than stereotypically female jobs, men are generally more satisfied with stereotypically male jobs.