Concern about job instability and insecurity has a long history and has generated a considerable body of research across the social sciences, most recently focused on whether job stability and security have declined. Internally flexible systems for organizing work, sometimes called 'functionally...

Interest in the potential effects of different systems for organizing work and managing employees on the performance of organizations has a long history in the social sciences. The interest in economics, arguably more recent, reflects a general concern about the sources of competitiveness in...

We investigate gift exchange relationships in real jobs, making use of a field quasi-experiment associated with the exercise of stock options for roughly 4500 managers in a large public company. In this company, option grants are set equally for all employees within occupational categories, and...

The extensive literature on knowledge management spans several fields, but there are remarkably few studies that address the basic question as to whether knowledge management practices improve organizational performance. I examine that question using a national probability sample of...

The notion of regular, full-time employment as one of the defining features of the U.S. economy has been called into question in recent years by the apparent growth of alternative or "nonstandard" arrangements - part-time work, temporary help, independent contracting, and other arrangements....

Franchise jobs are often described as representing the epitome of the quot;low roadquot; approach to managing employees: high turnover, little training, deskilled jobs, and little employee involvement, practices often seen as unsophisticated. Research on franchise operations suggests, however,...

We test the hypothesis that IT workers accept a compensating differential to work with emerging IT systems, and that employers that invest in these systems can, in turn, capture greater value from the wages they pay. We show that much of the utility IT workers derive from these systems is from...

Concerns that there are problems with the supply of skills, especially education-related skills, in the US labor force have exploded in recent years with a series of reports from employer-associated organizations but also from independent and even government sources making similar claims. These...

This paper investigates employee performance appraisals using data from a single US firm between 2001 and 2007. We find that performance appraisals are both informative and drive important components of the employment contract. We find that employee appraisal scores vary considerably both...

We examine the relationship between wages and skill requirements in a sample of over 50,000 managers in 39 companies between 1986 and 1992. The data include an unusually good measure of job requirements and skills that can proxy for human capital. We find that wage inequality increased both...