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...

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...

Intangible knowledge capital (IKC) - technology produced by workers but not embodied in them - can offset the "middle income trap" as China exhausts the benefits of international technology transfer. IKC is productivity-enhancing among Chinese enterprises - more so in domestically owned than in...

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,...

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...

Using nationally representative workplace data we find substantial use of high-performance work systems (HPWS) in Britain's small enterprises. We find empirical support for the proposition that HPWS have a non-linear association with employees' overall job attitude, with a positive association...

I examine the history of employee engagement and how it has been characterised by thinkers in sociology, psychology, management and economics. I suggest that, while employers may choose to invest in employee engagement, there are alternative management strategies that may be profit-maximising. I...

A long-running debate in the small firms' literature questions the value of formal 'human resource management' (HRM) practices which have been linked to high performance in larger firms. We contribute to this literature by exploiting linked employer-employee surveys for 2004 and 2011. Using...

Using multilevel mixed effects ordered logistic models, this paper conducts an original investigation of the new management as a technology approach for all EU nations in a framework that explicitly recognizes worker representation while incorporating the notion of affective commitment. It is...