Abstract
Personnel economics is the application of economic and mathematical approaches and econometric and statistical methods to traditional questions in human resources management. Many of the issues studied by personnel economists can be found in traditional textbooks written by organizational behaviour scholars and other human resources specialists. Economists have something new to say about these issues, however, primarily because economics provides a rigorous, and in many cases more straightforward, way to think about these human resources questions than do the more sociological and psychological approaches.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsBibliography
Akerlof, G. 1984. Gift exchange and efficiency wage theory: Four views. American Economic Review 74: 79–83.
Bergson, A. 1978. Managerial risks and rewards in public enterprises. Journal of Comparative Economics 2: 211–225.
Cheung, S.N.S. 1969. The theory of share tenancy: With special application to Asian agriculture and the first phase of Taiwan land reform. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Drago, R., and G.T. Garvey. 1998. Incentives for helping on the job: Theory and evidence. Journal of Labor Economics 16: 1–25.
Ehrenberg, R.G., and M.L. Bognanno. 1990. Do tournaments have incentive effects? Journal of Political Economy 98: 1307–1324.
Eriksson, T. 1999. Executive compensation and tournament theory: Empirical tests on Danish data. Journal of Labor Economics 17: 262–280.
Eriksson, T., and M.-C. Villeval. 2004. Other-regarding preferences and performance pay. An experiment on incentives and sorting. Discussion Paper No. 1191, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn.
Falk, A., and E. Fehr. 2006. The power and limits of tournament incentives. Mimeo: University of Bonn.
Fernie, S., and D. Metcalf. 1999. It’s not what you pay it’s the way that you pay it and that’s what gets results: Jockeys’ pay and performance. Labour 13: 385–411.
Gibbons, R. 1987. Piece-rate incentive schemes. Journal of Labor Economics 5: 413–429.
Goldin, C. 1986. Monitoring costs and occupational segregation by sex: A historical analysis. Journal of Labor Economics 4: 1–27.
Hölmstrom, B. 1979. Moral hazard and observability. Bell Journal of Economics 10: 74–91.
Hutchens, R.M. 1986. Delayed payment contracts and a firm’s propensity to hire older workers. Journal of Labor Economics 4: 439–457.
Hutchens, R.M. 1987. A test of Lazear’s theory of delayed payment contracts. Journal of Labor Economics 5: S153–S170.
Hutchens, R.M. 1989. Seniority, wages and productivity: A turbulent decade. Journal of Economic Perspectives 3(4): 49–64.
Ichniowski, C., K. Shaw, and G. Prennushi. 1997. The effects of human resource management practices on productivity. American Economic Review 86: 291–313.
Ichniowski, C., K. Shaw, and W. Boning. 2001. Opportunity counts: Teams and the effectiveness of production incentives. Working Paper No. 8306. Cambridge, MA: NBER.
Ichniowski, C., K. Shaw, and A. Bartel. 2007. How does information technology really affect productivity? Plant-level comparisons of product innovation, process improvement and worker skills. Quarterly Journal of Economics (forthcoming).
Jensen, M.C., and J.M. Kevin. 1990. Performance pay and top management incentives. Journal of Political Economy 98: 225–264.
Johnson, D.G. 1950. Resource allocation under share contracts. Journal of Political Economy 58: 111–123.
Kahneman, D., and A. Tversky. 1979. Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica 47: 263–291.
Knoeber, C.R. 1989. A real game of chicken: Contracts, tournaments, and the production of broilers. Journal of Law, Economics & Organization 5: 271–292.
Lazear, E.P. 1986. Salaries and piece rates. Journal of Business 59: 405–431.
Lazear, E.P. 2000a. Performance pay and productivity. American Economic Review 90: 1346–1361.
Lazear, E.P. 2000b. Economic imperialism. Quarterly Journal of Economics 115: 99–146.
Lazear, E.P. 2000c. The future of personnel economics. Economic Journal 110: F611–F639.
Lazear, E.P., and S. Rosen. 1981. Rank-order tournaments as optimum labor contracts. Journal of Political Economy 89: 841–864.
Marshall, A.P. 1890. Principles of economics, 9th ed, with annotations by C.W. Guillebaud. London/New York: Macmillan, for the Royal Economic Society, 1961.
Oyer, P. 2004. Why do firms use incentives that have no incentive effects? Journal of Finance 59: 1619–1649.
Oyer, P., and S. Schaefer. 2005. Why do some firms give stock options to all employees: An empirical examination of alternative theories? Journal of Financial Economics 76: 99–133.
Paarsch, H.J., and B. Shearer. 1999. The response of worker effort to piece rates. Journal of Human Resources 34: 643–667.
Ross, S.A. 1973. The economic theory of agency: The principal’s problem. American Economic Review 63: 134–139.
Russell, K. 2005. Deferred compensation and employee retention. Ph.D. thesis, Department of Economics, Stanford University.
Shapiro, C., and J.E. Stiglitz. 1984. Equilibrium unemployment as a worker discipline device. American Economic Review 74: 433–444.
Stiglitz, J.E. 1975. Incentives, risk, and information: Notes toward a theory of hierarchy. Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science 6: 552–579.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2018 Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
About this entry
Cite this entry
Lazear, E. (2018). Personnel Economics. In: The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95189-5_2254
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95189-5_2254
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-95188-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-95189-5
eBook Packages: Economics and FinanceReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences