[...]... elsewhere.2 The list includes the effect of firm policies on the job ladders and career paths of workers; the effects of workforce composition on business growth and survival; as well as the micro-level analysis of the demand for labor, including the impact of technological and structural change The book features eleven papers selected from that conference They were selected by referees on the basis of their... include Bound and Johnson (19 92), Levy and Murnane (19 92), Katz and Murphy (19 92), Juhn, Murphy, and Pierce (19 93), Berman, Bound, and Griliches (19 94), and Allen (19 97) The Effect of HRM Practices and R&D Investment on Worker Productivity 21 necessary skills in-house, or they can structure their HRM practices to attract and recruit workers with the necessary skills on the external market For the econometric... maximize the value of their technological investments In other words, if firms choose to augment the skill of their workforce to complement an investment in technology, they face the traditional make-versus-buy problem Firms can structure their HRM practices to develop and retain the 1 See Brown and Campbell (2002) for a detailed review of the impact of technological change on the work and wages of individuals... from the LEHD program The detailed industry knowledge facilitates interpreting of the results and understanding the context in which the results are embedded This combined method expands the “insider econometrics” approach to the industry level of analysis Industries exhibit wide variation in their market and organizational structures, which affects their rate of technological change, their degree of and. .. in Central and Eastern European countries Indeed, these two chapters highlight the relative unpreparedness of the economics profession to fully understand the impact of transition policies Globalization, Trade, and Labor Markets Economists have long theorized about the impact of globalization and trade on the earning and employment outcomes of workers Unfortunately, because the impacts of trade are... intuition should pave the way to further fruitful analysis of the incidence and effect of HR practices using increasingly available matched administrative employer-employee data One of the great benefits of this approach is the potential to analyze the personnel choices and their correlation with worker and firm outcomes for a broad range of firms, workers, and phenomena of interest The price to pay for... workers and then link these HRM measures to plant and firm characteristics First, we document the firms’ HRM systems Implementation of HRM systems is more important than implementation of individual components because there are synergies and complementarities in HRM practices (Kandel and Lazear 19 92; and Milgrom and Roberts 19 95) We perform a cluster analysis of firms and HRM measures to identify and describe... skills for the new technology Under the assumption that the cost of “making” the required skills is the worker adjustment cost of acquiring skills (training cost) and is proportional to the size of technological jumps over a given time, and that the cost of “buying” the required skills is the firm’s adjustment costs in hiring new workers, which is invariant to the size of the technological jump, then for... depends on the portfolio of skills supplied in the firm compared to the portfolio of skills necessary for the new technology and the costs of obtaining the new portfolio, which include a comparison of the make decisions (primarily retraining costs) compared to buy decision (cost of new hires, layoffs, and worker morale) The costs to workers of retraining depend on their opportunity wage and the required... longitudinal earnings and turnover information from the universe of workers in a large sample of firms in a particular industry (electronics) The chapter then analyzes the joint of occurrence of indicators such as accession and separation rates or within-job wage growth in HR “clusters” and describes the practices of firms with high and low investment in R&D In a last step, the authors examine whether the interaction . by the National Bureau of Economic Research All rights reserved. Published 2008 Printed in the United States of America 17 1 615 1 413 1 211 100908 12 345 ISBN -13 : 978-0-226-04287-9 (cloth) ISBN -10 :. class="bi x0 y0 w0 h0" alt="" The Analysis of Firms and Employees A National Bureau of Economic Research Conference Report The Analysis of Firms and Employees Quantitative and Qualitative Approaches Edited. assistant professor of economics at Columbia University and a faculty research fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago