A principal often needs to match agents to perform coordinated tasks, but agents can quit or slack off if they dislike their match. We study two prevalent approaches for matching within organizations: Centralized assignment by firm leaders and self-organization through market-like mechanisms. We...

A number of branches of the literature on internal labor markets have matured to the point that there is now a healthy two-way interaction between theory and empirical work. In this survey I consider two of these branches: i) wage and promotion dynamics; and ii) human-resource practices. For...

This paper presents a theoretical model that combines employers learning about worker productivity, human capital acquisition, job-assignment and resolution of worker uncertainty regarding disutility of work from a job, to show how widely documented findings on both wage and promotion dynamics...

We join the scholarly conversation on the implications of the different configurations of firms' stakeholder coalitions for their employment practices, by investigating how the structural arrangements granting employees a role in firm boards of directors (employee governance representation, EGR)...

We use a rich personnel data set from a Russian firm for the years 1997 to 2002 to analyze how the financial crisis in 1998 and the resulting change in external labor market conditions affect the wages and the welfare of workers inside a firm. We provide evidence that large shocks to external...

The paper investigates the relative importance of job mobility for wages in comparison with human capital framework and the industry approach. Using German panel data, changes of workplaces within the firm as well as between the firms are carefully separated from occupational changes. Results...

The research area of the new economics of personnel has a short but important and insightful history. Theory ahead of measurement asks for testing newly developed human resource concepts. These tests often need detailed firm-specific data. Repetition and comparison of results is key in finding...