Documents seniority 17 results

"In general, retirement is seen as a pure labor supply phenomenon, but firms can have strong incentives to send expensive older workers into retirement. Based on the seniority wage model developed by Lazear (1979), we discuss steep seniority wage profiles as incentives for firms to dismiss older workers before retirement. Conditional on individual retirement incentives, e.g., social security wealth or health status, the steepness of the wage profile will have different incentives for workers as compared to firms when it comes to the retirement date. Using an instrumental variable approach to account for selection of workers in our firms and for reverse causality, we find that firms with higher labor costs for older workers are associated with lower job exit age."

"This article investigates whether past absence behaviour is a predictor of present absence duration in a large Danish municipality with 17,499 individuals observed from 1996 to 2004. Past absence behaviour is measured in both absence days and absence spells. The article also investigates a number of confounders such as gender, age, seniority, wage, contracted number of work hours and season. The results of the empirical study show that there is a significant positive relationship between employees' absence duration and past absence spells and past absence days, respectively. The study thus confirms that past days and past spells have an equal potential of predicting present absent. Past absence behaviour can thus be used as an early warning for managers. The study also confirms that personal characteristics such as age and seniority also influence absence duration. Moreover, job characteristics such as wage and contracted number of work hours also influence absence duration. Finally, the season of the year seems to influence absence duration."

"This paper examines the strategic tool kit, from a human resource management (HRM) perspective, in terms of usage and impact. Research to date has tended to consider usage, assuming to a certain extent that knowledge and understanding of particular tools suggest that practitioners value them. The research on which this paper is based builds upon the idea that usage indicates satisfaction, but develops the usage theme to investigate which decision-makers are actually engaged in both tool appliance and the strategic process. Of particular interest to the researchers are the educational background, age and seniority of the decision-makers. In addition, potential links with HRM and organizational performance are also explored. The context of the research, the German machinery and equipment sector, provides an insight into the industry's ability to sustain growth in face of increasing international competition. The paper calls for a greater awareness, from a human resource perspective, and utilization of strategic management practice and associated decision-making aids."

"We investigate wage differences between newly hired and incumbent employees in identical functions using detailed personnel data from a large number of banks. We first show in a formal model of job switching that (i) incumbents earn less than new recruits when human capital is mostly general but (ii) the opposite is the case if specific human capital is sufficiently important. In the empirical analysis we find that, on average, new hires earn more than comparable incumbents but – using a novel measure for the importance of specific human capital – these wage premia indeed strongly depend on human capital specificity."

"Der Beitrag stellt auf der Basis eines dreijährigen empirischen Forschungsprojekts Entgeltregelungen vor, mit denen Industrieunternehmen versuchen, auf Herausforderungen des demografischen Wandels zu reagieren und dessen innerbetriebliche Konsequenzen zu bewältigen. In ausgewählten Branchen (Bau- und Möbelindustrie) werden Beispiele für eine demografiesensible Entgeltpolitik herausgearbeitet, die zeigen, welche Entlohnungsgrundsätze und -methoden in der industriellen Realität angewendet werden, welche Eingruppierungskriterien mit Blick auf ältere Beschäftigte und alternde Belegschaften eine Rolle spielen (Qualifikationen, Arbeitsplatzanforderungen etc.), welche Bedeutung hierbei dem Leistungsentgelt sowie den ihm zugrunde liegenden Bewertungsmaßstäben zukommt. Die Fallstudien präsentieren eine breite Palette von spezifischen Maßnahmen, die unter anderem einen Entgeltschutz älterer Belegschaftsmitglieder, die planmäßige Nutzung innerbetrieblicher Umsetzung, die Weitergewährung von Zulagen oder auch teaminterne Ausgleichsmechanismen beinhalten – allesamt Bausteine von bereits totgesagten Entgeltmodellen mit Anciennitätscharakter (Betriebszugehörigkeit, Berufserfahrung)."

"We estimate a model of the joint participation and mobility along with the individuals' wage formation in France. Our model makes it possible to distinguish between unobserved person heterogeneity and state-dependence. We estimate the model using state of the art bayesian methods employing a long panel (1976-1995) for France. Our results clearly show that returns to seniority are small, and for some education groups are close to zero. The specification here is the same as that used in Buchinsky, Fougère, Kramarz and Tchernis (2002), where the returns to seniority were found to be quite large. This result also holds when using the method employed by Altonji and Williams (1992) for both countries. It turns out that differences between the two countries relate to firm-to-firm mobility. Using a model of Burdett and Coles (2003), we explain the rationale for this phenomenon. Specifically, in a low-mobility country such as France, there is little gain in compensating workers for long tenures because they tend to stay in the firm for most, if not all, of their career. This is true even in cases where individuals clearly possess substantial amount of firm-specific human capital. In contrast, for a high-mobility country such as the United States, high returns to seniority have a clear incentive effect, and firms are induced to pay the premium associated with firm-specific human capital to avoid losing their most productive workers."

"Aims: This study examined the relation between months on the job and lost-time claim rates, with a particular focus on age related differences.
Methods: Workers' compensation records and labour force survey data were used to compute claim rates per 1000 full time equivalents. To adjust for potential confounding, multivariate analyses included age, sex, occupation, and industry, as well job tenure as predictors of claim rates.
Results: At any age, the claim rates decline as time on the job increases. For example, workers in the first month on the job were over four times more likely to have a lost-time claim than workers with over one year in their current job. The job tenure injury associations were stronger among males, the goods industry, manual occupations, and older adult workers.
Conclusions: The present results suggest that all worker subgroups examined show increased risk when new on the job. Recommendations for improving this situation include earlier training, starting workers in low hazard conditions, reducing job turnover rates in firms, and improved monitoring of hazard exposures that new workers encounter."
(Authors' abstract)

"This paper investigates why seniority rules have been widely applied to both layoffs and promotion decisions in the USA. While it is shown that seniority rules can be economically efficient under certain circumstances (i.e. seniority rules can have substantive grounds), historical and empirical evidence indicates that (i) they are more popular than economic explanations would allow; (ii) they are not common outside the USA; and (iii) historically, they have often emerged from workers' demands for fair and objective personnel decisions. Based on these findings, this paper offers a normative explanation for seniority rules: they have procedural merits in that they can reduce potential conflicts and facilitate coordination among workers (and employers), especially when selection procedures and results might be viewed by workers as ‘lacking objectivity' or as ‘unfair'. Thus, seniority can be introduced ‘by default' as a focal point for coordination, even if it is not justifiable on substantive grounds. In this sense, seniority rules can emerge on procedural grounds. The historical process of adopting seniority is associated with the selection of an equilibrium in the situation of multiple equilibria, which is usually influenced by a variety of factors, such as historical, political, institutional, cultural ones."