Personnel Economics (1995)
| Venue: | Personnel Economics: Past Lessons and Future Directions‟, Journal of Labor Economics |
| Citations: | 68 - 1 self |
BibTeX
@ARTICLE{Lazear95personneleconomics,
author = {Edward P. Lazear},
title = {Personnel Economics},
journal = {Personnel Economics: Past Lessons and Future Directions‟, Journal of Labor Economics},
year = {1995},
pages = {199--236}
}
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Abstract
Personnel economics has grown over the past twenty years to become a major branch of labor economics. Beginning primarily as a theoretical field, recent empirical analyses have provided support for earlier theories. Personnel economics is distinguished from traditional personnel analysis in that it is economics. As such, personnel economists assume maximizing agents, invoke the concept of equilibrium, and focus on economic efficiency. Although much has been learned, many important questions remain. For example, are worker wage profiles dependent on individual attributes or is the firm more important in determining wage growth? Why are executives so highly paid and why does the pay take the form that it does? Why has the use of stock and stock options grown and why is stock sometimes given even to lower level employees? How can cross-country differences in pay patterns be explained? Does variable pay provide better incentives than do fixed hourly wages? Under which circumstances is one form of compensation used over another? These questions and others are investigated and some conjectures are offered. Personnel economics is defined as the application of microeconomic principles to human resources issues that are of concern to most businesses. The field, now about twenty years old, arose for three reasons. First, those of us who were teaching standard labor
