The objective of this paper is to analyse the role of migrants in innovation in Europe. We use Total Factor Productivity as a measure of innovation and focus on the three largest European countries - France, Germany and the United Kingdom - in the years 1994-2007. Unlike previous research, which...

Human resources can provide a competitive advantage to firms, but we still know little about how newly-founded ventures start mobilizing these resources. Given the central role of entrepreneurs' background in designing the strategy of new firms, we investigate whether and how startup experience,...

Partnering with the Census we implement a new survey of "structured" management practices in 32,000 US manufacturing plants. We find an enormous dispersion of management practices across plants, with 40% of this variation across plants within the same firm. This management variation accounts for...

This study investigates whether and when during the life cycle women fall behind in terms of career progression because of children. We use 1987-1997 Norwegian panel data that contain information on individuals' position in their career hierarchy as well as a direct measure of their promotions....

Most firms rely on subjective evaluations by supervisors to assess their employees' performance. This article discusses the implementation of such appraisal processes, exploring the use of multiple research methods such as the analysis of personnel records, survey data, and lab and field...

Personnel records are used to examine compensation, recruitment, and retention of a group of very highly skilled workers: civilian scientists and engineers in U.S. Department of Defense laboratories. In contrast to the private sector, returns to skills were largely flat for this group from...

This paper tackles some issues in personnel economics using the career profiles of British naval officers during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We ask how promotions, payouts, positions, and peers affect worker retention. Random variation in task assignments and job promotions allows us...

This paper presents on three new styled facts: first, schools of public affairs hire many economists; second, those economists are disproportionately female; and third, salaries in schools of public affairs are, on average, lower than salaries in mainline departments of economics. We seek to...

We estimate how exogenous worker exits affect firms' demand for incumbent workers and new hires. Drawing on administrative data from Germany, we analyze 34,000 unexpected worker deaths, which, on average, raise the remaining workers' wages and retention probabilities. The average effect masks...

The paper introduces a new measure of educational mismatch at the firm level, constructed by merging firm and individual data at the sector-firm size-year level. This measure captures both the intensity of mismatch and its type - whether overeducation, undereducation, or a mix of the two. We...