Two critical aspects of the model of auditor expertise development in Tan and Libby [1997] are that audit firms do not value tacit knowledge in inexperienced auditors but do value it in experienced auditors. We update the former and extend the latter. Our paper predicts and finds that audit...

Two critical aspects of Tan and Libby [1997]’s model of auditor expertise development are that audit firms do not value tacit knowledge in inexperienced auditors but do value it in experienced auditors. We update the former and extend the latter. Our paper predicts and finds that audit firms...

The CPA exam provides an evaluation of auditors' professional competence in the early stages of their careers. Using Swedish data, this paper shows that:i) auditors at Big 4 firms are younger when they take the exam, ii) younger auditors and auditors at Big 4 firms perform better in the exam,...

This paper analyzes the job assignment problem faced by a firm when workers' skills are distributed along several dimensions and jobs require different skills to varying extent. I derive optimal assignment rules with and without slot constraints, and show that under certain circumstances workers...

This paper explores whether firms recruit workers with different personality traits for different tasks. For our analysis, we used data from a discrete choice experiment conducted among recruiters of 634 firms in Germany. Recruiters were asked to choose between job applicants who differed in...

Matching talents to tasks is an important part of job design. Organizations routinely use performance thresholds to group agents by talent. We see thresholds defined both in terms of an individual's own performance (absolute value) and in terms of peer performance (percentile). Intuition...

In job ads, employers express demand for personality traits when seeking workers to perform tasks that can be completed with different behaviors (e.g., communication, problem-solving) but not when seeking workers to perform tasks involving narrowly prescribed sets of behaviors such as routine...

This paper analyzes the job assignment problem faced by a firm when workers' skills are distributed along several dimensions and jobs require different skills to varying extent. I derive optimal assignment rules with and without slot constraints, and show that under certain circumstances workers...

This paper investigates the changes in the German wage structure for full-time working males from 1999 to 2006. Our analysis builds on the task-based approach introduced by Autor et al. (2003), as implemented by Spitz-Oener (2006) for Germany, and also accounts for job complexity. We perform a...