The Inner Beauty of Firms

Abstract

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 largely unexplained by establishment size. The 25% most specialized salon-quarters are on average 60% more productive than the bottom 25%. To rationalize these facts, I identify and estimate a model in which firms characterized by different organization costs hire and assign tasks to workers with multidimensional skills in order to improve quality in an oligopolistic product market. I show that internal reorganization changes the partial and industry equilibrium effects of economic shocks. Neglecting task reassignment within the firm can therefore cause a researcher to misstate or reverse the aggregate productivity and specialization impacts of economic shocks.

Type
Presentations
  • Cowles Models and Measurement at Yale SOM
  • Southwestern Economic Theory Conference
  • ZEW Research with and within Organisations
  • MIT Sloan
  • Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics (SIOE)
  • Stanford Institute for Theoretical Economics
  • Duke Fuqua Junior Strategy Conference
  • UGA Terry College of Business
  • UPenn Labor, Firms and Macro Workshop
  • Society of Economic Dynamics
  • Harvard Business School
  • University of Chicago Booth
  • Cornell
  • Boston University
  • UNC Chapel Hill
  • Washington University St. Louis Olin
  • University of Wisconsin Madison
  • Claremont McKenna
  • Southern Economic Association Annual Meeting
  • Occidental College
  • GLO Global Conference
  • Urban Economics Association European Meeting
Awards
  • ZEW With and Within Orgs. Early Career Researcher Best Paper Prize
  • Oliver E. Williamson Best Conference Paper Award (SIOE)