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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

We show that socio-economic status (SES) is a powerful predictor of many facets of a child's personality. The facets of personality we investigate encompass time preferences, risk preferences, and altruism, as well as crystallized and fluid IQ. We measure a family's SES by the mother's and...

Despite the high growth of the Peruvian economy during the last decade, college graduates are facing increasing difficulties to find occupations that match their higher educational background, skills and educational investments. This scenario is embodied in the "professional underemployment"...

Homework is an important part of the academic production function, but often students are studying while doing another activity. Using the nationally representative Panel Study of Income Dynamics-Child Development Supplement time diaries, this chapter explores changes over the period 1997–2008...

We study the impact of a student's ordinal rank in a high school cohort on educational attainment several years later. To identify a causal effect, we compare multiple cohorts within the same school, exploiting idiosyncratic variation in cohort composition. We find that a student's ordinal rank...

As Switzerland experiences a severe shortage of nurses, this paper investigates the impact of students' ex ante wage expectations on their choice to pursue a nursing college education. This analysis contributes to a small yet rapidly developing body of literature that uses subjective expectation...