How to Compete: The Impact of Workplace Practices and Information Technology on Productivity
February 2002
Working Paper Number:
CES-02-04
Abstract
Using data from a unique nationally representative sample of businesses, the Educational Quality of the Workforce National Employers Survey (EQW-NES), matched with the Bureau of the Census' Longitudinal Research Database (LRD), we examine the impact of workplace practices, information technology, and human capital investments on productivity. We estimate an augmented Cobb Douglas production function with both cross section and panel data covering the period of 1987-1993 using both within and GMM estimators. We find that what is associated with higher productivity is not so much whether or not an employer adopts a particular work practice but rather how that work practice is actually implemented within the establishment. We also find that those unionized establishments that have adopted what have been called new or "transformed" industrial relations practices that promote joint decision making coupled with incentive based compensation have higher productivty than other similar non-union plants, while those businesses that are unionized but maintain more traditional labor management relations have lower productivity. We also find that the higher the average educational level of production workers or the greater the proportion of non-managerial workers who use computers, the higher is plant productivity.
Document Tags and Keywords
Keywords
Keywords are automatically generated using KeyBERT, a powerful and innovative
keyword extraction tool that utilizes BERT embeddings to ensure high-quality and contextually relevant
keywords.
By analyzing the content of working papers, KeyBERT identifies terms and phrases that capture the essence of the
text, highlighting the most significant topics and trends. This approach not only enhances searchability but
provides connections that go beyond potentially domain-specific author-defined keywords.
:
Tags
Tags are automatically generated using a pretrained language model from spaCy, which excels at
several tasks, including entity tagging.
The model is able to label words and phrases by part-of-speech,
including "organizations." By filtering for frequent words and phrases labeled as "organizations", papers are
identified to contain references to specific institutions, datasets, and other organizations.
:
Similar Working Papers
Similarity between working papers are determined by an unsupervised neural
network model
know as Doc2Vec.
Doc2Vec is a model that represents entire documents as fixed-length vectors, allowing for the
capture of semantic meaning in a way that relates to the context of words within the document. The model learns to
associate a unique vector with each document while simultaneously learning word vectors, enabling tasks such as
document classification, clustering, and similarity detection by preserving the order and structure of words. The
document vectors are compared using cosine similarity/distance to determine the most similar working papers.
Papers identified with đŸ”¥ are in the top 20% of similarity.
The 10 most similar working papers to the working paper 'How to Compete: The Impact of Workplace Practices and Information Technology on Productivity' are listed below in order of similarity.
-
Working PaperHiring through Startup Acquisitions: Preference Mismatch and Employee Departures
September 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-41
This paper investigates the effectiveness of startup acquisitions as a hiring strategy. Unlike conventional hires who choose to join a new firm on their own volition, most acquired employees do not have a voice in the decision to be acquired, much less by whom to be acquired. The lack of worker agency may result in a preference mismatch between the acquired employees and the acquiring firm, leading to elevated rates of turnover. Using comprehensive employee-employer matched data from the US Census, I document that acquired workers are significantly more likely to leave compared to regular hires. By constructing a novel peer-based proxy for worker preferences, I show that acquired employees who prefer to work for startups ' rather than established firms ' are the most likely to leave after the acquisition, lending support to the preference mismatch theory. Moreover, these departures suggest a deeper strategic cost of competitive spawning: upon leaving, acquired workers are more likely to found their own companies, many of which appear to be competitive threats that impair the acquirer's long-run performance.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperNOISE INFUSION AS A CONFIDENTIALITY PROTECTION MEASURE FOR GRAPH-BASED STATISTICS
September 2014
Working Paper Number:
CES-14-30
We use the bipartite graph representation of longitudinally linked em-ployer-employee data, and the associated projections onto the employer and em-ployee nodes, respectively, to characterize the set of potential statistical summar-ies that the trusted custodian might produce. We consider noise infusion as the primary confidentiality protection method. We show that a relatively straightfor-ward extension of the dynamic noise-infusion method used in the U.S. Census Bureau's Quarterly Workforce Indicators can be adapted to provide the same confidentiality guarantees for the graph-based statistics: all inputs have been modified by a minimum percentage deviation (i.e., no actual respondent data are used) and, as the number of entities contributing to a particular statistic increases, the accuracy of that statistic approaches the unprotected value. Our method also ensures that the protected statistics will be identical in all releases based on the same inputs.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperWhat Do I Take With Me: The Impact of Transfer and Replication of Resources on Parent and Spin-Out Firm Performance
February 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-06
Focusing on entrepreneurial ventures created by employees leaving a firm, our study examines the differential impact of knowledge transfer and knowledge spillovers on both parent and spin-out performance. While extant research often uses knowledge transfer and spillover interchangeably, our study distinguishes between the two based on the 'rivalness' of the relevant knowledge. We theorize that both knowledge transfer (proxied by the size of the exiting employee team) and knowledge spillovers (proxied by the experience of the exiting employee team) will aid spin-out performance. However, knowledge transfer, being more rival, will have a greater adverse impact than knowledge spillovers on parent firm performance. Using U.S. Census Bureau linked employee-employer data from the legal services industry, we find support for our hypotheses. Our study thus contributes to extant literature by highlighting a key dimension of knowledge ' rivalness ' and the differential competitive dynamics effect of resources with varying degrees of rivalness.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperChanges in Firm Pension Policy: Trends Away from Traditional Defined Benefit Plans
November 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-36
In light of the recent concerns regarding the solvency of Social Security's Old-Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance (OASDI), private pensions may play an increasingly important role in retirement welfare of US retirees. However, the private pension landscape has evolved in ways that may result in lower private pension wealth for retirees. One recent such phenomenon involves the conversion of traditional defined benefit pension plans to cash balance plans, which resulted in lower pension benefits for many workers. In this study, I investigate how characteristics of the firm's workforce influenced whether the firm converted their traditional pension plan to a cash balance plan and how these characteristics related to the firm's pension plan policy more generally. Using the Longitudinal Employer-Household Data and pension plan data from the Department of Labor/Internal Revenue Service and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, I found little evidence of workforce age distribution effects on the likelihood of DB plan conversion to a cash balance plan in the 1990s. More generally, I consistently find positive associations between firms with older and more female workforces and defined contribution plans during the same time.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperWho Leaves, Where to, and Why Worrry? Employee Mobility, Employee Entrepreneurship, and Effects on Source Firm Performance
September 2009
Working Paper Number:
CES-09-32
We theorize that differences in human assets' ability to generate value are linked to exit decisions and their effects on firm performance. Using linked employee-employer data from the U.S. Census Bureau on legal services, we find that employees with higher earnings are less likely to leave relative to employees with lower earnings, but if they do leave, they are more likely to move to a spin-out instead of an incumbent firm. Employee entrepreneurship has a larger adverse impact on source firm performance than moves to established firms, even controlling for observable employee quality. Findings suggest that the transfer of human capital, complementary assets, and opportunities all affect mobility decisions and their impact on source firms.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperEntrepreneurial teams' acquisition of talent: a two-sided approach
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-45
While it is crucial for startups to hire high human capital employees, little is known about what drives the hiring decisions. Considering the stakes for both startups and their hires (i.e., joiners), we examine the phenomenon using a two-sided matching model that explicitly reveals the preferences of each side. We apply the model to a sample of startups from five technological manufacturing industries while examining a range of variables grounded in prior work on startup human capital. The analysis is based on the Longitudinal Employer Household dynamics from the U.S. Census Bureau. Our findings indicate that, in the context of entrepreneurship, both startups and joiners rely heavily on signals of quality. Further, quality considerations that are important for the match play a minimal role in determining earnings. Our approach refines our understanding of how entrepreneurial human capital evolves.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperDo SBA Loans Create Jobs? Estimates from Universal Panel Data and Longitudinal Matching Methods
September 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-27
This pape reports estimates of the effects of the Small Business Administration (SBA) 7(a) and 504 loan programs on employment. The database links a complete list of all SBA loans in these programs to universal data on all employers in the U.S. economy from 1976 to 2010. Our method is to estimate firm fixed effect regressions using matched control groups for the SBA loan recipients we have constructed by matching exactly on firm age, industry, year, and pre-loan size, plus kernel-based matching on propensity scores estimated as a function of four years of employment history and other variables. The results imply positive average effects on loan recipient employment of about 25 percent or 3 jobs at the mean. Including loan amount, we find little or no impact of loan receipt per se, but an increase of about 5.4 jobs for each million dollars of loans. When focusing on loan recipients and control firms located in high-growth counties (average growth of 22 percent), places where most small firms should have excellent growth potential, we find similar effects, implying that the estimates are not driven by differential demand conditions across firms. Results are also similar regardless of distance of control from recipient firms, suggesting only a very small role for displacement effects. In all these cases, the results pass a "pre-program" specification test, where controls and treated firms look similar in the pre-loan period. Other specifications, such as those using only matching or only regression imply somewhat higher effects, but they fail the pre-program test.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperHUMAN CAPITAL LOSS IN CORPORATE BANKRUPTCY
July 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-37
This paper quantifies the 'human costs of bankruptcy' by estimating employee wage losses induced by the bankruptcy filing of employers using employee-employer matched data from the U.S. Census Bureau's LEHD program. We find that employee wages begin to deteriorate one year prior to bankruptcy. One year after bankruptcy, the magnitude of the decline in annual wages is 30% of pre-bankruptcy wages. The decrease in wages persists (at least) for five years post-bankruptcy. The present value of wage losses summed up to five years after bankruptcy amounts to 29-49% of the average pre-bankruptcy market value of firm. Furthermore, we find that the ex-ante wage premium to compensate for the ex-post wage loss due to bankruptcy can be of similar magnitude with that of the tax benefits of debt.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperAn Analysis of Key Differences in Micro Data: Results from the Business List Comparison Project
September 2008
Working Paper Number:
CES-08-28
The Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of the Census each maintain a business register, a universe of all U.S. business establishments and their characteristics, created from independent sources. Both registers serve critical functions such as supplying aggregate data inputs for certain national statistics generated by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. This paper examines key micro-level differences across these two business registers.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperPrivate Equity and Workers: Modeling and Measuring Monopsony, Implicit Contracts, and Efficient Reallocation
June 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-37
We measure the real effects of private equity buyouts on worker outcomes by building a new database that links transactions to matched employer-employee data in the United States. To guide our empirical analysis, we derive testable implications from three theories in which private equity managers alter worker outcomes: (1) exertion of monopsony power in concentrated markets, (2) breach of implicit contracts with targeted groups of workers, including managers and top earners, and (3) efficient reallocation of workers across plants. We do not find any evidence that private equity-backed firms vary wages and employment based on local labor market power proxies. Wage losses are also very similar for managers and top earners. Instead, we find strong evidence that private equity managers downsize less productive plants relative to productive plants while simultaneously reallocating high-wage workers to more productive plants. We conclude that post-buyout employment and wage dynamics are consistent with professional investors providing incentives to increase productivity and monitor the companies in which they invest.View Full Paper PDF
