The design of optimal immigration policy, particularly in the face of the spiralling demand for highly skilled workers, such as IT workers and engineers, is a topical issue in the policy debate as well as the economic literature. In this paper, we present empirical evidence from firm level data...

Many start-ups chose to compete with incumbent firms using one of two generic strategies: cost leadership or differentiation. Our study demonstrates how this choice depends on whether the startup was founded out of necessity. Our results, based on a representative data set of 4,568 German...

Teamwork and cooperation between workers can be of substantial value to a firm, yet the level of worker cooperation often varies between individual firms. We show that these differences can be the result of labor market competition if workers have heterogeneous preferences and preferences are...

Strategy research often aims to empirically establish a causal relationship between an independent variable and a dependent variable such as firm performance. For many important strategy research questions, however, traditional empirical techniques are not sufficient to establish causal effects...

It has been claimed that the market fosters selfishness and thereby undermines the moral basis of society. This thesis has been developed with an emphasis on market exchange. Everyday life is, however, predominantly shaped by interactions in the workplace rather than by shopping behaviour. This...

We use a laboratory experiment to examine whether and to what extent other-regarding preferences of team leaders influence their leadership style in choice under risk. We find that leaders who prefer efficiency or report high levels of selfishness are more likely to exercise an autocratic...

What are the performance benefits of investing in human resources in a low-cost labor environment where returns to such investment are widely perceived as negligible? This paper presents a matched pair case study on the performance effect of human resource management systems at two garment...

The research area of the new economics of personnel has a short but important and insightful history. Theory ahead of measurement asks for testing newly developed human resource concepts. These tests often need detailed firm-specific data. Repetition and comparison of results is key in finding...

This paper contributes to the emerging strand of the empirical literature that takes advantage of new data on workplace-specific job attributes and voluntary employee turnover to shed fresh insights on the relationship between employee turnover, adverse workplace conditions and HRM environments....

This paper sheds light on how changes in the organization of work can help to understand increasing wage inequality. We present a theoretical model in which workers with a wider span of competence (higher level of multitasking) earn a wage premium. Since abilities and opportunities to expand the...