Bundling tasks into jobs is an essential element of organizational design. We here examine whether workers should be assigned broader or narrower sets of tasks, i.e. should job design be “flexible” or “specialized”. We investigate the individual productivity effects of flexibility using...

Several studies have shown that dictator-game giving declines substantially if the dictator can exploit situational "excuses" for not being generous. In this experimental study we investigate if this result extends to more natural social interactions involving reciprocal behavior. We provide the...

Transition provides an unexplored opportunity to study how changes in ownership affect structure and human resource policies of firms. We investigate a unique data set (17 years, 1500 white collar workers) of a Russian insider-privatized firm. In contrast to conventional beliefs about...

We investigate the entry of low-cost airlines (LCAs) in the German passenger transportation market. Using market research data and unique turnover and pricing information, we document that substitution rates between LCA and the incumbent rail operator Deutsche Bahn (DB) are substantial. As the...

Railways restructuring takes place under very different circumstances and with very different goals in Western Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, and Russia. Observed improvements in productivity associated with vertical access and vertical separation in Western Europe are not certain to be...

We study how transition has affected human resource policies of a Russian heavy industry firm. Our data set contains personnel files of 1538 white-collar workers over 17 years: from 1984 to 2000. We find career paths before the first year of Gaidar's reforms, 1992, when Russian transition to a...

This paper analyzes workers' choices to sort in large and small firms. Workers care to realize their ideas as they share the associated benefits with the firm. Small firms being less capitalized are more inclined to realize their workers' risky ideas, but better capitalized firms provide safe...

External shocks may cause a decline in the productivity of fixed capital in certain regions of an economy. Exogenous obstacles to migration make it hard for workers in those regions to reallocate to more prosperous regions. In addition; firms may devise “attachment” strategies to keep...