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

We evaluate the effects of employer-provided formal training on employee suggestions for productivity improvements and on promotions among male blue-collar workers. Using more than 20 years of personnel data of four entry cohorts in a German company, we address issues such as unobserved heterogeneity and the length of potential training effects. Our main finding is that workers are more likely to make suggestions and to be promoted after they have received formal training. However, the effect on suggestions is only short term. Promotion probabilities are greatest directly after training, but also seem to be affected in the long term.

Tournament compensation systems are widely used in practice and have been extensively analyzed theoretically. However, one major problem has hardly been studied in a company context so far: Although it is theoretically well understood that tournament compensation systems are only effective when employees are homogeneous, it has rarely been analyzed what companies can do when they are confronted with employee heterogeneity. In our article, we derive hypotheses on the performance effects of tournament compensation systems in a context of employee heterogeneity based on tournament and expectancy theory. Using personnel records from incentive travel contests, we are able to show that performance is lower in a situation with employee heterogeneity, but that in heterogeneous tournaments, incentives may still work for a subgroup of employees whom we term the “threshold group.” In addition, we also show how companies manage to design the information disclosure systems necessary to install effective “handicapping” or “league-building” systems in order to increase the effort-performance expectancy.

This paper contributes to the existing literature by evaluating the effects of age and tenure on careers and productivity within an internal labor market. We use the administrative personnel records of a long balanced panel of blue-collar workers from a manufacturing firm in Germany with a distinct classification of wage groups and unique information on workers’ productivity in form of suggestions for productivity improvement. Using robust locally weighted regression, our main findings suggest that the probability of promotion is highest for younger workers and early in the career. Older workers are less likely to be promoted. The likelihood of making a rewarded suggestion is inversely u-shaped with respect to tenure and age. Furthermore, workers’ ability and firm-specific human capital determine the workers’ careers and productivity.

This article investigates how age diversity within a company's workforce affects company productivity. It introduces a theoretical framework that helps integrate results from a broad disciplinary spectrum of ageing and diversity research to derive empirically testable hypotheses on the effects of age diversity on company productivity. It argues that first the balance between costs and benefits of diversity determines the effect of age diversity on company productivity, and that second the type of task performed acts as a moderator. To test these hypotheses, it uses a large-scale employer–employee panel data set. Results show that increasing age diversity has a positive effect on company productivity if and only if a company engages in creative rather than routine tasks.

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

Das Ausspielen der Berufs- bildung gegen eine gymnasiale Maturität ist falsch. Dies zeigen neue Studien der Universitäten Zürich und Bern.

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