Personnel Economics.

• Position: Bureau News - Papers discussed at March 6 and 7, 2003 meeting

A new NBER Working Group on Personnel Economics met in Cambridge on March 6 and 7. Edward P. Lazear, NBER and Stanford University, organized the meeting, at which these papers were discussed:

Edward P. Lazear and Paul Oyer, Stanford University, "Ports of Entry"

Audra Bowlus, University of Western Ontario, and Lars Vilhuber, Cornell University, "Displaced Workers, Early Leavers, and Re-Employment Wages"

Steffen Huck, University College London; Dorothea Kubler, Humboldt University Berlin; and Jorgen Weibull, Boston University, "Social Norms and Economic. Incentives in Firms" Illoong Kwon, University of Michigan, and Eva Meyersson Milgrom, Stanford University, "Occupation Structure and Boundaries of Internal Labor Markets"

Christian Grund, University of Bonn, "The Wage Policy of Firms: Comparative Evidence for the U.S. and Germany from Personnel Data"

Anders Frederiksen and Niels Westergaard-Nielsen, Aarhus School of Business, "Where Did They Go?"

Ann Bartel and Casey Ichniowski, NBER and Columbia University; Richard Freeman, NBER and Harvard University; and Morris Kleiner, NBER and University of Minnesota, "The Effects of Employee Attitudes about their Workplaces on Turnover and Productivity: An Analysis of Retail Commercial Banking"

Paul A. Lengermann, Federal Reserve Board, "Is it Who You Are, Where You Work, or With Whom You Work? Reassessing the Relationship Between Skill Segregation and Wage Inequality"

Tor Eriksson, Aarhus School of Business, and Jaime Ortega, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, "The Adoption of Job Rotation: Testing the Theories"

Amos Golan, American University, and Julia Lane, Urban Institute, "The Dynamics of Worker Reallocation: A Markov Approach"

Early statements on internal labor markets view firms as consisting of ports-of-entry jobs and other jobs. Workers are hired into the former and promoted to the latter. In the strictest form, external hiring only takes place at certain job levels and thereafter workers are insulated from the forces of market competition. Lazear and Oyer use data from the Swedish Employers' Confederation to determine the existence of ports of entry in firms that represent a large part of the Swedish economy. Although there is a great deal of promotion from within, at every level there remains significant hiring from the outside. The data are more consistent with tournament theory, or with theories of firm-specific human capital, than they are with the more rigid institutional views.

Bowlus...