Performance pay and managerial experience in multitask teams: evidence from within a firm

This article exploits a quasi‐experimental setting to estimate the impact that a commonly used performance‐related pay scheme had on branch performance in a large distribution firm. The scheme, which is based on the Balanced Scorecard, was implemented in all branches in one division but not in another. Branches from the second division are used as a control group. Our results suggest that the Balanced Scorecard had some impact but that it varied with branch characteristics, and, in particular, branches with more experienced managers were better able to respond to the new incentives

Does Postponing Minimum Retirement Age Improve Healthy Behaviours Before Retirement? Evidence from Middle-Aged Italian Workers.

By increasing the residual working horizon of employed individuals, pension reforms that rise minimum retirement age can affect individual investment in health-promoting behaviors before retirement. Using the expected increase in minimum retirement age induced by a 2004 Italian pension reform and a difference-in-differences research design, we show that middle-aged Italian males affected by the reform reacted to the longer working horizon by increasing regular exercise, with positive consequences for obesity and self-reported satisfaction with health

Jobs as Lancaster Goods: Facets of Job Satisfaction and Overall Job Satisfaction

Overall job satisfaction is likely to reflect the combination of partial satisfactions related to various features of one’s job, such as pay, security, the work itself, working conditions, working hours, and the like. The level of overall job satisfaction emerges as the weighted outcome of the individual’s job satisfaction with each of these facets. The purpose of this study is to determine the extent and importance of partial satisfactions in affecting and explaining overall job satisfaction. Using the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) a two layer model is estimated which proposes that job satisfaction with different facets of jobs are interrelated and the individual’s reported overall job satisfaction depends on the weight that the individual allocates to each of these facets. For each of the ten countries examined, satisfaction with the intrinsic aspects of the job is the main criterion which workers use to evaluate their job and this is true for both the short and the long term.European Commissio

Finance, Human Capital, Technical Assistance, and the Business Environment in Romania

Although the development of a new private sector is generally considered crucial to economic transition and development, there has been little empirical research on the determinants of startup firm growth. This paper uses panel data techniques to analyze a survey of 297 new small enterprises in Romania containing detailed information from the startup date through 2001. We find strong evidence that access to external finance (loans) increases the growth of both employment and sales. Taxes appear to constrain growth. There is some evidence that entrepreneurial skills increase growth, but only weak evidence for the effectiveness of technical assistance, and only when it is provided by foreign partners or international agencies. A wide variety of alternative measures of the business environment (contract enforcement, property rights, and corruption) are tested, but are found to have little or no association with firm growth.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/40025/3/wp639.pd

Can Productive Capacity Differentials Really Explain Earnings Differentials Associated with Demographic Characteristics? Case of Experience

This study uses computerized personnel microdata on the white male managerial and professional employees at a major U.S. corporation to address the following question: Can the additional earnings which are associated with more labor market experience at a point in time really be explained by higher productivity at the same point in time? Our answer to this question, based on both cross-sectional and longitudinal information, is that performance plays a substantially smaller role in explaining cross-sectional experience-earnings differentials and earnings growth than is claimed by those who have adopted the human capital explanation of the experience-earnings profile. This response depends critically on our assumption that the performance ratings which supervisors give to their white male managerial and professional subordinates adequately reflect the subordinates' relative productivity in the year of assessment; we present a great deal of evidence which strongly supports this assumption.

The Effective Use of Limited Information: Do Bid Maximums Reduce Procurement Cost in Asymmetric Auctions?

Conservation programs faced with limited budgets often use a competitive enrollment mechanism. Goals of enrollment might include minimizing program expenditures, encouraging broad participation, and inducing adoption of enhanced environmental practices. We use experimental methods to evaluate an auction mechanism that incorporates bid maximums and quality adjustments. We examine this mechanism’s performance characteristics when opportunity costs are heterogeneous across potential participants, and when costs are only approximately known by the purchaser. We find that overly stringent maximums can increase overall expenditures, and that when quality of offers is important, substantial increases in offer maximums can yield a better quality-adjusted result.

Immigrant earnings in the Italian labour market

The aim of this paper is to assess the relationship between individual skills and labour market performance of immigrants residing in Lombardy during the period 2001-2005. We use a recent dataset collected by the NGO ISMU, which includes information on individual characteristics and the legal status of each immigrant. Our results show that returns on schooling are positive and range from 0.8 per cent to 0.9 per cent, a figure that is much lower than the one estimated for native Italians. This result is robust to a number of specifications and tests. In particular, it is not influenced by the legal status of the alien or by a possible self-selection in the labour supply. Moreover, although more talented immigrants tend to self-select in the Lombardy region compared with the other Italian regions, their return on schooling remains low compared with natives. We also show that a certain heterogeneity exists across educational levels and countries of origin: immigrants from Eastern Europe are better able to exploit their human capital, especially when they hold a university degree, while the school-wage profile of Latin Americans and Asians is basically flat. Finally, there is some evidence of a cohort effect in migration, but this tends to impact on the return on experience rather than on the return on schooling.Immigration, return on schooling, return on experience

Labour market job matching for UK minority ethnic groups

Estimates of over education from different ethnic groups are presented using a new method of calculating over education and data from the UK Labour Force Survey. Calibrated against existing mean methods, the new approach leads to lower levels of over education for men and women. While the overall extent of over education has similarities with earlier studies, the differences between ethnic groups are far less than those found in some studies and fall even further when we control for other productivity related differences. Gender differences can be partially explained by differences in working part-time, whereas some ethnic differences are exacerbated slightly by being temporarily over educated, as well as by differences in the subject of degree