In a new model of work schedules, employers choose the number of working hours and either dictate the exact hours to be worked or delegate that decision to workers via flextime. Workers' preferences over schedules influence their productivities. An inverted-U-shaped hours-output profile arises;...

We empirically investigate possible distortions in subjective performance evaluations. A key hypothesis is that evaluations are more upward biased the closer the social ties between supervisor and appraised employee. We test this hypothesis with a company data set from a call center organization...

In this paper, we estimate tenure-performance profiles using unique panel data that contain detailed information on individual workers' performance. We find that a 10 per cent increase in tenure leads to an increase in performance of 5.5 per cent of a standard deviation. This translates to an...

Employee referrals are a very common means by which firms hire new workers. Past work suggests that workers hired via referrals often perform better than non-referred workers, but we have little understanding as to why. In this paper, we demonstrate that this is primarily because referrals allow...

We present a field experiment in which we set up a call-center to study how the productivity of workers is affected if managers treat their co-workers in an unfair way. This question cannot be studied in long-lived organizations since workers may change their career expectations (and hence...

This paper studies the link between working hours and productivity using daily information on working hours and performance of a sample of call centre agents. We exploit variation in the number of hours worked by the same employee across days and weeks due to central scheduling, enabling us to...

Using linked data for British workplaces and employees we find a low base rate of workplace-level availability for five family-friendly work practices--parental leave, paid leave, job sharing, subsidized child care, and working at home -- and a substantially lower rate of individual-level...

In 2020, parents' work-from-home days increased fourfold following the initial COVID-19 pandemic lockdown period compared to 2015-2019. At the same time, many daycares closed, and the majority of public schools offered virtual or hybrid classrooms, increasing the demand for household-provided...

We evaluate a temporary public sector employment program targeted at individuals with weak labor market attachment, applying dynamic inverse probability weighting to account for dynamic selection. We show that the program is successful in increasing employment and reducing social assistance....

Using a unique dataset of establishments in Germany surveyed during the Covid-19 pandemic, this study investigates whether personnel adjustments during the crisis differed between establishments with and without a works council. Our regression analyses show that the hiring and dismissal rate as...