Teams, in both firms and in sports, jointly produce a product. While a fixed task is assigned to each member of a team, the individual team productivity of a worker or player is difficult to conceptualize. This is particularly true, if this concept is aimed to be operable on observable data. In...

We study the effects of a field experiment designed to motivate employee ideas, at a large technology company. Employees were encouraged to submit ideas on process and product improvements via an online system. In the experiment, the company randomized 19 account teams into treatment and control...

One of the most powerful internet communication channels is email. As employees and their clients communicate primarily via email, much crucial business data is conveyed via email content. Where businesses are understandably concerned, they need a sophisticated workflow management system to...

Are differences in inventor productivity due to differences in inventors’ skills or differences in the capabilities of the firms they work for? We analyze a 37-year panel that tracks the patenting of U.S. inventors and find strong evidence for serial correlation in inventors’ productivity....

Email is one of the most powerful tools for communication. Many businesses use email as the main channel for communication, so it is possible that substantial data are included in email content. In order to help businesses grow faster, a workflow management system may be required. The data...

In this paper we estimate, for the 1989-93 period in Belgium, the effect of vocational classroom training on therate of transition out of unemployment. We show that rationing of the demand for training increases theunemployment duration of non-participants, an effect neglected in programme...

Across countries, women own significantly fewer businesses than do men. We show that this is due, in large part, to the fact that the propensity to start businesses of women is significantly lower than that of men. The lower propensity of women, in turn, appears to be highly correlated to...