P1

Project Team:
Prof. Dr. Michael Beckmann, Professor at the University of Basel
Univ.-Prof. Dr. Bernd Schauenberg, Professor at the University of Freiburg
Grit Mühler, Scientific Assistant at ZEW Mannheim

The project contains four sub-projects:

1. Technical and Organizational Change and the Firms� Labor Demand for Skilled Female and Elderly Workers: In analogy to a skilled-biased technological and organizational change it will be investigated, whether or not there is a gender-biased technological change or an age-biased technological change, respectively. More precisely, does the firms� heterogeneous labor demand for female and male workers as well as for younger and elderly workers depend on technological and organizational innovations, or do other effects dominate, for example, flexible working times or early retirement plans?
2. Determinants and Consequences of Contingent Labor Contracts: The aim of this sub-project is to investigate, whether contingent contracts apart from their firing cost saving and flexibility function also serve as a screening device within firms. In this case, contingent contracts may provide an incentive for workers to increase effort in order to gain a long-term employment contract. Consequently, it is useful to analyse the productivity effects of heterogeneous labor contracts (long-term contracts vs. contingent contracts). Is there some evidence in terms of an extra productivity effect for contingent workers? Measures for productivity include, for example, labor productivity, absenteeism, overtime, motivation problems, job satisfaction, and work injuries.
3. Approaches to Protect Firms� Investments in General Human Capital: In this sub-project the firms� incentives to increase their effort to provide and pay for general apprenticeship training will be investigated. The existing literature mainly focuses on labor market imperfections, which help firms to protect their revenues from apprenticeship training by reducing the mobility of trained workers. The approach here is different because it centers personnel management on its own, and thus, focuses on the level of the individual firm. Firms have an incentive to invest in general training, when the trained workers tend to refrain from accepting exit options. It is assumed that profit and capital sharing plans are suitable instruments to encourage trained workers to stay with the firm. Consequently, the impact of these financial incentives on apprentice rates, quit rates, and retention rates will be analysed.
4. Flexibility Capabilities in Wage Policy and Work Organization: An important task of modern personnel management is the organization of complementarities. At first, it is therefore necessary to identify the complementary instruments within the firm. If complementarities can be identified, a next step is to analyse the determinants of systems of personal management. What are the differences between firms, which use team work, team incentives and training simultaneously, and firms, which do not use these instruments? Finally, the analyses should also contribute to answer the questions in terms of causation, while examining the productivity effects of modern human resource managements systems.

All sub-projects represent consequent advancements of the current discussion. The theoretical analysis is based on the modern personnel economics. Hence, the investigations mainly focus on the level of the firm and thus deal with firm strategies. All topics will be analysed econometrically, which is facilitated by the availability of firm and individual level data sets.