Showing results 1 - 10 of 21
February 2021, Paper: "Using administrative data from a major Chinese insurance firm that raised its sales targets and rewards for insurance agents in a highly non-linear incentive system, we find that the improvement in productivity far outweighed the costs associated with bunching distortions and other gaming behaviors. Labor turnover decreased, which suggests that the extra pay for workers exceeded the non-pecuniary cost of extra effort by…
January 2020, Paper: "This paper presents an Agent-Based Model (ABM) that seeks to explain the concordance of sluggish growth of productivity and of real wages found in macro-economic statistics, and the increased dispersion of firm productivity and worker earnings found in micro level statistics in advanced economies at the turn of the 21st century. It shows that a single market process unleashed by the decline of unionization can account for…
December 16, 2020, Audio: "Adding robots to factories, retail stores or mines was historically seen as a job killer by workers and the unions that support them. But this year, automation has allowed sectors of the economy to continue producing with fewer people, minimizing the coronavirus risk for workers. U.S. economy reporter Olivia Rockeman explains what that might mean in the long term and what needs to happen to help the displaced. Host…
November 2020, Paper: "This paper was presented at the October 2019 Cornell ILR Conference on “Models of Linked Employer-Employee Data” celebrating Abowd, Kramarz, and Margolis's 1999 AKM decomposition model, and at the Stanford SIEPR “Working Longer and Retirement” conference, also held in October 2019. Thanks to Nicole Fortin and Paul Oyer for comments. Any views expressed are those of the authors and not those of the U.S. Census Bureau or the…
2020, Paper: "In this study, we analyze the impacts of minimum wages on firms’ robot adoption using novel panel data related to robots imported by firms in China from 2001 to 2012, a period when most of China’s robots are imported. We find that minimum wages raise firms’ robot adoption significantly. The effects of minimum wages on robot adoption are larger for firms in routine-intensive industries, for firms in labor-intensive industries, and…
January 2020, Paper, "Recent analyses of the potential effects of advanced technology on jobs has tended to focus on possible reductions in routine cognitive white-collar jobs due to computer algorithms and in blue-collar jobs due to robots and factory automation. This paper provides a different perspective on the possible future of work by: (1) measuring changes in job attributes/tasks from 2005 to 2015, straddling the boundary between the pre-…
| George Borjas
From Immigrants to Robots: The Changing Locus of Substitutes for Workers. George Borjas, Richard Freeman, January 2019, Paper, "Increased use of robots has roused concern about how robots and other new technologies change the world of work. Using numbers of robots shipped to primarily manufacturing industries as a supply shock to an industry labor market, we estimate that an additional robot reduces employment and wages in an industry by roughly…
The Twin Track Model of Employee Voice: An Anglo-American Perspective. Richard Freeman, 2018, Book Chapter, "This chapter will review the major studies undertaken in the twenty-first century to assess the changing nature of employee voice in the Anglo-American context. These studies are predominantly based on employee perceptions but also include …"…
Journal of Participation and Employee Ownership (JPEO) in the changing world of participative work practices and pay. Richard Freeman, 2018, Paper, "Work practices and modes of pay have changed in recent decades. The combination of an increasingly educated work force, new information and communication technologies, the influx of AI and big data into business practices from production and sales to human resources, the increased importance of…
The Role of Employee Stock Purchase Plans — Gift and Incentive? Evidence from a Multinational Corporation. Richard Freeman, May 29, 2018, Paper, "Employee share purchase plans (ESPPs) give free or discounted shares of stock to workers who buy shares in the hope that the greater share ownership will retain workers, build loyalty and raise productivity, as in gift exchange models. Using measures of workers' organizational loyalty and sense of…