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nep-hrm New Economics Papers
on Human Capital and Human Resource Management
Issue of 2023‒05‒08
six papers chosen by
Patrick Kampkötter
Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen

  1. Overconfidence and Gender Equality in the Labor Market By Spencer Bastani; Thomas Giebe; Oliver Gürtler
  2. Closing the Psychological Distance: The Effect of Social Interactions on Team Performance By Hattori, Keisuke; Yamada, Mai
  3. Relative Performance Feedback and Long-Term Tasks – Experimental Evidence from Higher Education By Raphael Brade; Oliver Himmler; Robert Jaeckle
  4. Mismatch in Preferences for Working from Home – Evidence from Discrete Choice Experiments with Workers and Employers By Lewandowski, Piotr; Lipowska, Katarzyna; Smoter, Mateusz
  5. Working from Home, COVID-19 and Job Satisfaction By Laß, Inga; Vera-Toscano, Esperanza; Wooden, Mark
  6. The Contribution of Digital Firms to Productivity Growth in the Manufacturing Sector: A Decomposition Approach By Simon Bruhn; Johanna Deperi

  1. By: Spencer Bastani; Thomas Giebe; Oliver Gürtler
    Abstract: Gender differences in overconfidence have been extensively documented in the empirical literature, but the implications for labor market outcomes are not well understood. In this paper, we analyze how men’s relatively higher overconfidence, combined with competitive job incentives, affects gender equality in the labor market and discuss policy implications. The vehicle of analysis is a promotion-signaling model in which wages are realistically determined by market forces. We find that overconfident workers exert more effort to be promoted, and even though they have lower expected ability conditional on promotion, they are more likely to be promoted and experience superior wage growth. Because overconfident workers compete fiercely, they incur higher effort costs and discourage their peers, and we find that overconfidence can be either self-serving or self-defeating.
    Keywords: overconfidence, promotion, competition, gender gap, tournament, theory
    JEL: C72 D91 J16 J24 M51 M52
    Date: 2023
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_10339&r=hrm
  2. By: Hattori, Keisuke; Yamada, Mai
    Abstract: Social interactions in the workplace can generate reciprocal peer effects and narrow the psychological distance for team prosociality among coworkers. Incorporating such a psychological interdependence into a team production model, we investigate how the optimal social interactions characterized by the type of task the team is performing (complementary or substitutable tasks) and the vertical and horizontal structure of the team (with or without leadership). We find that in the case of complementary tasks, social interactions can enhance team performance not only for horizontal teams but also for vertical teams led by more prosocial leaders, by narrowing the prosociality gap among members and resolving task bottlenecks. On the other hand, in the cases of horizontal and vertical teams performing substitutable tasks and vertical teams performing complementary tasks supported by a more prosocial follower, social interactions can actually decrease team performance. Our results provide important implications for organizations in considering when, for what type of team, by whom, and to what extent to promote social interaction within teams that bring members' personal (psychological) distances closer, as a means of enhancing organizational effectiveness.
    Keywords: team production; social interaction; prosociality; reciprocity; team leadership; peer effects
    JEL: C72 D21 M50
    Date: 2023–04–12
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:117042&r=hrm
  3. By: Raphael Brade; Oliver Himmler; Robert Jaeckle
    Abstract: We present first experimental evidence that relative performance feedback improves both the speed and quality with which challenging long-term tasks are completed. Providing university students with ongoing relative feedback on accumulated course credits accelerates graduation by 0.12 SD, and also improves grades by 0.063 SD. Treatment effects are concentrated among students with medium pre-treatment graduation probabilities: when these students are informed about an above-average performance, their outcomes improve – otherwise their outcomes deteriorate. Combined with survey evidence, this pattern of results suggests that learning about own ability is a plausible mechanism.
    Keywords: relative performance feedback, rank, natural field experiment, higher education, perceived ability, belief updating
    JEL: C93 D83 D91 I21 I23 I24
    Date: 2023
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_10346&r=hrm
  4. By: Lewandowski, Piotr (Institute for Structural Research (IBS)); Lipowska, Katarzyna (Institute for Structural Research (IBS)); Smoter, Mateusz (Institute for Structural Research (IBS))
    Abstract: We study workers' and employers' preferences for remote work, estimating the willingness to pay for working from home (WFH) using discrete choice experiments with more than 10, 000 workers and more than 1, 500 employers in Poland. We selected occupations that can be done remotely and randomised wage differences between otherwise identical home- and office-based jobs, and between otherwise identical job candidates, respectively. We find that demand for remote work was substantially higher among workers than among employers. On average, workers would sacrifice 2.9% of their earnings for the option of remote work, especially hybrid WFH for 2-3 days a week (5.1%) rather than five days a week (0.6%). However, employers, on average, expect a wage cut of 21.0% from candidates who want to work remotely. This 18 pp gap in the valuations of WFH reflects employers' assessments of productivity loss associated with WFH (14 pp), and the additional effort required to manage remote workers (4 pp). Employers' and workers' valuations of WFH align only in 25-36% of firms with managers who think that WFH is as productive as on-site work.
    Keywords: working from home, remote work, discrete choice experiment, willingness to pay
    JEL: J21 J31 J81
    Date: 2023–03
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp16041&r=hrm
  5. By: Laß, Inga (Bundesinstitut für Bevölkerungsforschung (BiB)); Vera-Toscano, Esperanza (University of Melbourne); Wooden, Mark (Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research)
    Abstract: This paper examines the impact of the growth in the incidence of working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic on workers' job satisfaction. Using longitudinal data collected in 2019 and 2021 as part of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey, fixed-effects models of job satisfaction are estimated. Changes in the share of total weekly work hours usually worked from home are not found to have any significant association with changes in job satisfaction for men. In contrast, a strong significant positive (but non-linear) association is found for women, and this relationship is concentrated on women with children. These findings suggest the main benefit of working from home for workers arises from the improved ability to combine work and family responsibilities, something that matters more to women given they continue to shoulder most of the responsibility for house and care work.
    Keywords: working from home, telework, job satisfaction, COVID-19, HILDA Survey, gender, work-family balance
    JEL: J22 J28
    Date: 2023–03
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp16019&r=hrm
  6. By: Simon Bruhn (Ilmenau University of Technology, Ilmenau, Germany); Johanna Deperi (Universita degli Studi di Brescia, Italy; Université Côte d'Azur, CNRS, GREDEG, France)
    Abstract: We show that digital and non-digital firms differ significantly with respect to their contribution to productivity growth. Conducting a decomposition analysis on panel data of publicly listed U.S. manufacturing firms covering the 1990-2015 period, we demonstrate that (i) firmlevel productivity improvements of digital firms consistently exceed those of non-digital firms; (ii) the market selection process works more efficiently for digital firms; and (iii) the negative correlation between productivity changes and changes in market shares is decisively less pronounced for digital than for non-digital firms. We show that these observed differences in productivity growth can be linked to the idiosyncratic characteristics of digital firms, namely the profound exploitation of digital technologies, the scalability of digital business models and the complementarity of digital and labor investments.
    Keywords: Digital firms, industry dynamics, productivity growth, decomposition, labor reallocation
    JEL: E24 J24 L11 L25 O33 O47
    Date: 2022–12
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:gre:wpaper:2022-42&r=hrm

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