Contributions published at Empirical Research in Business, Industrial Relations and Human Resource Management (Uschi Backes-Gellner)

This study presents evidence of heterogeneous returns to education over the wage distribution. The authors use instrumental variable quantile regression and data from the Swiss Labor Force Survey to identify the causal link between education and wages at different quantiles of the conditional distribution of wages. The results provide evidence that there is no unique causal effect of schooling and that for each individual the effect may deviate from those extensively documented by ordinary least squares or two-stage least squares. In particular, while ordinary quantile regression estimates increasing returns in the quantile index, once the endogeneity of schooling is taken into account the authors instead observe higher returns at lower quantiles of the wage distribution. Interpreting the quantile index as a measure of unobserved ability, the results suggest that higher-ability individuals have higher wages, but the slope of their wage-education profile is flatter than that for lower ability individuals.

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We examine the effect of pregnancy and parenthood on the research productivity of academic economists. Combining the survey responses of nearly 10,000 economists with their publication records as documented in their RePEc accounts, we do not find that motherhood is associated with low research productivity. Nor do we find a statistically significant unconditional effect of a first child on research productivity. Conditional difference-in-differences estimates, however, suggest that the effect of parenthood on research productivity is negative for unmarried women and positive for untenured men. Moreover, becoming a mother before 30 years of age appears to have a detrimental effect on research productivity.

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Although previous literature has found substantial differences between female and male workers in almost all labor market outcomes, the question of whether training participation differs between female and male part-time workers has been neglected. This article provides a novel examination of whether the part-time training gap is gender-dependent. Using a Swiss dataset, we find that men engaged in part-time employment suffer from a serious training disadvantage in comparison to men working full-time and that this effect is not found for women. Thus, in countries where part-time participation levels differ significantly between men and women, part-time employment is a “bane” to men but not to women. Women, however, “pay the price” merely by virtue of being female.

This paper investigates the effect of financial incentives on student performance and analyzes for the first time how the incentive effect in education is moderated by students' time preferences. To examine this effect, we use real labor market incentive programs that we combine with data from experiments on time preferences. We find not only that students who are offered financial incentives for better grades have on average better first- and second-year grade point averages but also, more strikingly, that highly impatient students respond more strongly to financial incentives than relatively patient students. This finding suggests that financial incentives are most effective at the beginning of an educational program, when real labor market benefits are in the distant future.

This paper analyses whether tertiary education of different types, i.e., academic or vocational tertiary education, leads to more or less favourable labour market outcomes. We study the problem for Switzerland, where more than two thirds of the workforce gain vocational secondary degrees and a substantial number go on to a vocational tertiary degree but only a small share gain an academic tertiary degree. As outcome variables, we examine the risk of being unemployed, monthly earnings, and variation in earnings (reflecting financial risk). We study these outcomes at career entry and later stages. Our empirical results reveal that the type of tertiary education has various effects on these outcomes. At career entry, we observe equal unemployment risk but higher average wages and lower financial risk for vocational graduates. At later career stages, we find that these higher average wages disappear and risk of unemployment becomes lower for vocational graduates. Thus, by differentiating the tertiary system into vocational and academic institutions graduates face a variety of valuable options allowing them to self-select into an educational type that best matches their individual preferences.

Despite the fact that childbearing is time-consuming (i.e., associated with a negative resource effect), we descriptively find female researchers with children in business and economics to be more productive than female researchers without children. Hence, female researchers with children either manage to overcompensate the negative resource effect associated with childbearing by working harder (positive incentive effect), or only the most productive female researchers decide to go for a career in academia and have children at the same time (positive self-selection effect). Our first descriptive evidence on the timing of parenthood among more than 400 researchers in business and economics from Austria, Germany and the German-speaking part of Switzerland hints at the latter being the case: only the most productive female researchers with children dare to self-select (or are selected) into an academic career. Our results have important policy implications when it comes to reducing the “leaky pipeline” in academia.

Innovation research increasingly focuses on understanding why and how firms implement new management practices, processes or structures. Emerging in the shadow of research on technological innovation, growing evidence points towards the inter-firm relation as an important locus of innovation. Yet although organizational theory suggests discrete alternative inter-firm coordination mechanisms, the literature on management innovation has thus far treated the inter-firm relation as one broad mode of organizing. This study takes a configurational perspective to identify archetypes of inter-firm relations leading to the implementation of management innovation. Using fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to analyse 56 firm partnerships in China’s biopharmaceutical industry, the empirical evidence identifies four such discrete inter-firm archetypes: organic coalitions, bureaucratic foundations, coalitions of intense interdependency and reciprocal foundations. The results suggest that the type of interdependency, rather than the coordination mechanisms governing inter-firm relations, leads to the implementation of management innovation.

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The optimal human resource and skill development strategy is one important factor of economic success. This paper, therefore, analyzes industry-specific differences in the training provision between engineering and retailing companies in Japan and focuses in particular on the initial training provision for intermediate skills at the firm level. Based on 11 in-depth interviews in the retailing and the engineering sector in Japan, we find that gross training costs per basic trainee are significantly higher in engineering than in retailing. However, not only the engineering companies, but also their employees bear higher costs than their counterparts in retailing. The absolute and relative entrance wages for production employees are significantly lower than the entrance wages of employees in sale. Even though wages in engineering increase significantly stronger within the first five years, the absolute and relative wages in engineering remain still significantly lower. The results relate to the qualification levels of new trainees and the career paths.

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