Many of the exports of developing countries are channeled through global value chains (GVCs), which also act as conduits for new technologies. However, new capabilities and productive employment remain limited so far to a tiny sliver of globally integrated firms. GVCs and new technologies...

The best worker is not always the best candidate for manager. In these cases, do firms promote the best potential manager or the best worker in her current job? Using microdata on the performance of sales workers at 214 firms, we find evidence consistent with the “Peter Principle,” which...

This paper surveys two related pieces of the labor-economics literature: incentive pay and careers in organizations. In the discussion of incentives, I first summarize theory and evidence related to the classic agency model, which emphasizes the tradeoff between insurance and incentives. I then...

Although economic models of training decisions are framed in terms of a company's calculation of the costs and benefits of such training, empirical work has never been able to test this model directly on company behavior. This paper utilizes a unique database to analyze the determinants of the...

This paper studies the forces which determine how diversity at a firm evolves over time. We consider a dynamic model o a single firm with two levels of employees, the entry level and the upper level. In each period, the firm selects a subset of the entry-level workers for promotion to the upper...

The Clinton administration has made job training and skill upgrading a major priority. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has already presented a bold program for skill enhancement drawing on a new consensus in certain circles of the social science and policy communities about the need to upgrade...

This paper utilizes data on the personnel policies and economic characteristics of businesses in the manufacturing sector to study the relationship between employee training and labor productivity. The major finding is that businesses that were operating below their expected labor productivity...

This paper is an econometric analysis of the on-the-job training (OJT) decisions of a group of white American males during 1975. The data are obtained from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, which asked a very careful series of questions concerning the individual's OJT status. Each individual's...

A salient feature of globalization in recent decades is the emergence of "global supply chains" in which different countries specialize in different stages of a sequential production process. In Arnaud Costinot, Jonathan Vogel and Su Wang (2011), CVW hereafter, we have developed a simple theory...

Recent advances in information technology (IT) have enabled firms in many industries to give middle managers new access to timely production data. Process monitoring' technologies give distant managers a window to production which can both lower their cost of monitoring subordinates and provide...