Production and Learning in Teams

Kyle Herkenhoff, Jeremy Lise, Guido Menzio and Gordon Phillips

No 2018-088, Working Papers from Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group

Abstract: The effect of coworkers on the learning and the productivity of an individual is measured combining theory and data. The theory is a frictional equilibrium model of the labor market in which production and the accumulation of human capital of an individual are allowed to depend on the human capital of coworkers. The data is a matched employer-employee dataset of US firms and workers. The measured production function is supermodular. The measured human capital function is non-linear: Workers catch up to more knowledgeable coworkers, but are not dragged down by less knowledgeable ones. The market equilibrium features a pattern of sorting of coworkers across teams that is inefficiently positive. This inefficiency results in low human capital individuals having too few chances to learn from more knowledgeable coworkers and, in turn, in a stock of human capital and a flow of output that are inefficiently low.

Keywords: human capital; knowledge diffusion; search frictions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E24 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge, nep-hrm, nep-lma and nep-mac
Note: M
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

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http://humcap.uchicago.edu/RePEc/hka/wpaper/Herken ... n-learning-teams.pdf First version, October, 2018 (application/pdf)

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Working Paper: Production and Learning in Teams (2018)
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