Good Job
Idleness Aversion and the Need for Justifiable Busyness
Christopher Hsee, Adelle Yang & Liangyan Wang
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
There are many apparent reasons why people engage in activity, such as to earn money, to become famous, or to advance science. In this report, however, we suggest a potentially deeper reason: People dread idleness, yet they need a reason to be busy. Accordingly, we show in two experiments that without a justification, people choose to be idle; that even a specious justification can motivate people to be busy; and that people who are busy are happier than people who are idle. Curiously, this last effect is true even if people are forced to be busy. Our research suggests that many purported goals that people pursue may be merely justifications to keep themselves busy.
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Managerial talent, motivation, and self-selection into public management
Josse Delfgaauw & Robert Dur
Journal of Public Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
The quality of public management is a recurrent concern in many countries. Calls to attract the economy's best and brightest managers to the public sector abound. This paper studies self-selection into managerial positions in the public and private sector, using a model of a perfectly competitive economy where people differ in managerial ability and in public service motivation. We find that, if demand for public sector output is not too high, the equilibrium return to managerial ability is always higher in the private sector. As a result, relatively many of the more able managers self-select into the private sector. Since this outcome is efficient, our analysis implies that attracting a more able managerial workforce to the public sector by increasing remuneration to private-sector levels is not cost-efficient.
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IQ in the Production Function: Evidence from Immigrant Earnings
Garett Jones & Joel Schneider
Economic Inquiry, July 2010, Pages 743-755
Abstract:
We show that a country's average IQ score is a useful predictor of the wages that immigrants from that country earn in the United States, whether or not one adjusts for immigrant education. Just as in numerous microeconomic studies, 1 IQ point predicts 1% higher wages, suggesting that IQ tests capture an important difference in cross-country worker productivity. In a cross-country development accounting exercise, about one-sixth of the global inequality in log income can be explained by the effect of large, persistent differences in national average IQ on the private marginal product of labor. This suggests that cognitive skills matter more for groups than for individuals.
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David Howell & Anna Okatenko
International Review of Applied Economics, May 2010, Pages 333-357
Abstract:
Comparisons of national labor market performance have conventionally relied on standard unemployment and employment rates (UR and ER) and these two 'quantity-of-employment' indicators have framed policy debates on the merits of reforms that would move European labor markets closer to the 'American Model.' This paper compares French and US performance using a variety of alternative indicators, including new measures that account for job quality. While the UR was much higher for France between 1984 and 2007, it was lower than the US rate before 1984 and the rates have since converged. It is also significant but not well-known that both prime-age ERs and youth unemployment-to-population rates have been quite similar in recent decades. We calculate two new summary indicators from each country's main household survey for 1993-2005 designed to account for the adequacy of pay and hours of work as well as the number of unemployed and employed (the underemployed share of the labor force and the adequately employed share of the working age population). France shows superior performance on both, especially for less-educated workers, and the French advantage has grown substantially since the late 1990s.
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Does supported employment work?
Melayne Morgan McInnes, Orgul Demet Ozturk, Suzanne McDermott & Joshua Mann
Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Summer 2010, Pages 506-525
Abstract:
Providing employment-related services, including supported employment through job coaches, has been a priority in federal policy since the enactment of the Developmental Disabilities Assistance and Bill of Rights Act in 1984. We take advantage of a unique panel data set of all clients served by the South Carolina Department of Disabilities and Special Needs between 1999 and 2005 to investigate whether job coaching leads to stable employment in community settings. The data contain information on individual characteristics, such as IQ and the presence of emotional and behavioral problems, that are likely to affect both employment propensity and likelihood of receiving job coaching. Our results show that unobserved individual characteristics and endogeneity strongly bias naive estimates of the effects of job coaching. However, even after correcting for these biases, an economically and statistically significant treatment effect remains.
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Training and productivity: Evidence for US manufacturing industries
Facundo Sepúlveda
Oxford Economic Papers, July 2010, Pages 504-528
Abstract:
We use a panel of two digit manufacturing industries to examine the role of formal training programs in productivity growth and wage growth. We find evidence for positive and decreasing effects of on-the-job training (OJT) in human capital accumulation, and therefore productivity. We find however weak evidence that OJT affects wage growth, suggesting that the firm appropriates most of the benefits from OJT programs. Off-the-job training on the other hand has no effects on industrial productivity or wages.
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How passive ‘face time' affects perceptions of employees: Evidence of spontaneous trait inference
Kimberly Elsbach, Dan Cable & Jeffrey Sherman
Human Relations, June 2010, Pages 735-760
Abstract:
We examine how passive ‘face time' (i.e. the amount of time one is passively observed, without interaction) affects how one is perceived at work. Findings from a qualitative study of professional office workers suggest that passive face time exists in two forms: 1) being seen at work during normal business hours - or expected face time, and 2) being seen at work outside of normal business hours - or extracurricular face time. These two forms of passive face time appear to lead observers to make trait inferences (i.e. they lead observers to perceive employees as either ‘dependable' or ‘committed', depending on the form of passive face time). Findings from an experimental study confirm our qualitative findings and suggest that trait inferences are made spontaneously (i.e. without intent or knowledge of doing so).We discuss the implications of our findings for theories of person perception and the practice of performance appraisal.
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Recruitment Restrictions and Labor Markets: Evidence from the Postbellum U.S. South
Suresh Naidu
Journal of Labor Economics, April 2010, Pages 413-445
Abstract:
This article studies the effect of recruitment restrictions on mobility and wages in the postbellum U.S. South. I estimate the effects of criminal fines charged for "enticement" (recruiting workers already under contract) on sharecropper mobility, tenancy choice, and agricultural wages. I find that a $13 (10%) increase in the enticement fine lowered the probability of a move by black sharecroppers by 12%, daily wages by 1 cent (.1%), and the returns to experience for blacks by 0.6% per year. These results are consistent with an on‐the‐job search model, where the enticement fine raises the cost of recruiting an employed worker.
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Back to Work: Expectations and Realizations of Work after Retirement
Nicole Maestas
Journal of Human Resources, Summer 2010, Pages 718-748
Abstract:
This paper analyzes a puzzling aspect of retirement behavior known as "unretirement." Nearly 50 percent of retirees follow a nontraditional retirement path that involves partial retirement or unretirement, and at least 26 percent of retirees later unretire. I explore two possible explanations: (1) unretirement transitions result from failures in planning or financial shocks; and (2) unretirement transitions are anticipated prior to retirement, reflecting a more complex retirement process. I show that unretirement was anticipated for the vast majority of those returning to work, and is not a result of financial shocks, poor planning or low wealth accumulation.
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Learning but Not Earning? The Impact of Job Corps Training on Hispanic Youth
Alfonso Flores-Lagunes, Arturo Gonzalez & Todd Neumann
Economic Inquiry, July 2010, Pages 651-667
Abstract:
Why did Hispanics who participated in Job Corps (JC) training not experience earnings gains like whites and blacks, despite achieving similar human capital gains? We find that the differential labor market outcomes of each group are related to the different levels of local labor market unemployment rates (LUR) they face. Furthermore, the groups exhibit differential impacts on their earnings from the LUR they face, which also vary by randomization status. We find that (a) blacks and Hispanics face higher LUR that mitigate their potential gains from JC and (b) JC "shields" whites from adverse LUR, but not blacks and Hispanics.
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The Labor Economics of Paid Crowdsourcing
John Horton & Lydia Chilton
Harvard Working Paper, April 2010
Abstract:
We present a model of workers supplying labor to paid crowdsourcing projects. We also introduce a novel method for estimating a worker's reservation wage - the key parameter in our labor supply model. We tested our model by presenting experimental subjects with real-effort work scenarios that varied in the offered payment and difficulty. As predicted, subjects worked less when the pay was lower. However, they did not work less when the task was more time-consuming. Interestingly, at least some subjects appear to be "target earners," contrary to the assumptions of the rational model. The strongest evidence for target earning is an observed preference for earning total amounts evenly divisible by 5, presumably because these amounts make good targets. Despite its predictive failures, we calibrate our model with data pooled from both experiments. We find that the reservation wages of our sample are approximately log normally distributed, with a median wage of $1.38/hour. We discuss how to use our calibrated model in applications.
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Cohort Effects in Promotions and Wages: Evidence from Sweden and the United States
Illoong Kwon, Eva Meyersson Milgrom & Seiwoon Hwang
Journal of Human Resources, Summer 2010, Pages 772-808
Abstract:
This paper studies the long-term effects of the business cycle on workers' future promotions and wages. Using the Swedish employer-employee matched data, we find that a cohort of workers entering the labor market during a boom gets promoted faster and reaches higher ranks. This procyclical promotion cohort effect persists even after controlling for workers' initial jobs, and explains at least half of the wage cohort effects that previous studies have focused on. We repeat the same analyses using personnel records from a single U.S. company, and obtain the same qualitative results.
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Brita Bjørkelo, Ståle Einarsen & Stig Berge Matthiesen
Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, June 2010, Pages 371-394
Abstract:
This paper reports on the role of personality as an antecedent of proactive behaviour at work in the form of whistleblowing. In the interest of triangulation, two studies were used, along with two personality measures. The results of Study 1, conducted among 503 municipality employees, show that the NEO Five-Factor Inventory dimensions of extraversion and agreeableness are significantly associated with whistleblowing, with odds ratios of 1.13 and 0.91, respectively. The result from Study 2, conducted among a representative sample of employees, shows that the circumplex of interpersonal problems dimension domineering was significantly associated with whistleblowing, with an odds ratio of 1.66. The results suggest that personality, in the form of high extraversion and dominance and low agreeableness, do play a role as antecedents of whistleblowing.
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Sachiko Kuroda
Journal of the Japanese and International Economies, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using Japanese time-use data from the Survey on Time Use and Leisure Activities (STULA), this paper measures trends in average hours worked (market work) and leisure for Japanese over the past three decades. OECD reports at least a 15 percent decline in market work for Japan since the 1970s. However, holding demographic changes constant, we found that market work per week increased from the 1970s until mid 1980s, and has been relatively stable for the last two decades for both male and female full-time workers. Furthermore, although the market work per week remained relatively constant since the mid 1980s, we found a significant change in the allocation of time to market work within the week during the period. Specifically, when dividing samples into weekdays (Monday through Friday) and weekends (Saturday and Sunday), average hours spent for market work per weekday among full-time males increased by 0.4 hour since the mid 1980s, whereas a significant decline in market work on Saturday was observed. This suggests that people shifted their work time from Saturday to weekdays in response to the reduced work week introduced by the amendment of the Labour Standards Act at the end of 1980s. In the meantime, commuting time and home production had decreased by 3 hours since the mid-1980s for full-time female workers, indicating that the average hours of leisure had increased for females even though market work remained the same. Interestingly, however, hours for sleep declined consistently over the last three decades, resulting in a 3-4 hour reduction per week for both male and female workers. Lastly, a comparison of Japanese and US time use data suggests that Japanese work much longer than their American counterparts. On average, Japanese males work 8.6 hours longer per week, and Japanese females 6.5 hours longer, than Americans, even after adjusting for demographic differences between the countries.