Suchergebnisse

AbstractWe study a bonus pay setting where a principal hires a supervisor to evaluate a group of potentially shirking workers. The supervisor and her workers develop relational feelings (either positive or negative) after interacting with each other. We analyze a novel class of organizational infractions where the supervisor provides false evaluations of the workers' performance to accommodate her other-regarding preferences. We show that the workers' reaction to these supervisory violations and their decision to provide effort depend on their relational concerns. The implication is that incentive pays can be ineffective due to the distortion of relational concerns.

AbstractThis work examines how workplace employee organizations causally affect the adoption of advanced digital technologies in Italy. It does so by using information from the survey "Rilevazione Imprese e Lavoro" conducted by the National Institute for Public Policy Analysis on a nationally representative sample of Italian firms in the non-agricultural private sector in 2018. It shows that workplace employee organizations increase the probability of advanced digitalization by around 15 percentage points per year, and the number of different technologies adopted by 0.41. The empirical strategy follows an IV approach that eliminates simultaneity bias and builds upon a lagged internal instrument combined with a NUTS-3 measure of altruism—namely, per capita blood donations. Results survive when cybersecurity is excluded from the analysis and prove robust when the internal instrument is left alone, combined with an index of tolerance or with propensity score matching.

AbstractAn established tenet of the literature is that the use of flexible labor leads to less innovation. Yet, less attention has been paid to the possibility that it is the decision to innovate that generates the incentive to hire on a permanent basis. The goal of this paper is to show the existence of interlocking complementarities between the firm's technological and hiring strategies. To do so, we develop a simple model where the workers' decision to invest in human capital is affected by the type of employment contract (temporaryversuspermanent) and by the type of technological investments (routineversusinnovative). When the firm is unable to coordinate its actions across these different domains, two equilibria simultaneously exist: in the 'high-road' equilibrium, firms invest more in innovative projects and hire on a permanent basis; in the 'low-road' equilibrium, they invest more in routine projects and hire on a temporary basis.