Using millions of task assignments from salon management software, I find significant establishment-level dispersion in labor productivity and internal task specialization and a strong association between the two that is unexplained by establishment size. The 25% most specialized salon-quarters are on average 68% more productive than the bottom 25%.
Whether tips should be treated differently than wages under tax and minimum-wage laws depends on whether they incentivize service quality. I develop a test for incentive relevant tipping, capable of detecting both quality-based social norms and forward-looking behavior, that consists of a simple regression of first-time tip percentages on an indicator for whether a customer returns in the future.
In the United States public sector, there are many examples where overtime is allocated informally, and overtime earnings are concentrated among a small number of government workers. Is this government inefficiency driven by insider influence, or an efficient reflection of worker preferences?
Consumer reviews reflect both product quality and price, with more favorable reviews for a lower-priced product. We study whether this review behavior induces a firm to manipulate reviews by underpricing its product below consumers’ willingness to pay.
In this paper, I study how voluntary labor supply decisions within an organization impact workplace injury using novel data on the payroll and workers’ compensation claims of Los Angeles traffic officers. I use the leave taken by coworkers as an instrument to estimate the causal effect of daily labor supply decisions on workplace injury.
This paper provides a microfoundation for the Shannon mutual information as a measure of management in organizations that must complete many tasks. We propose a model where an organization must assign an arbitrarily long sequence of tasks of different types to workers with different skills.