Business Commons^™

The Challenge Of Regulatory Excellence, Cary Coglianese

All Faculty Scholarship

Regulation is a high-stakes enterprise marked by tremendous challenges and relentless public pressure. Regulators are expected to protect the public from harms associated with economic activity and technological change without unduly impeding economic growth or efficiency. Regulators today also face new demands, such as adapting to rapidly changing and complex financial instruments, the emergence of the sharing economy, and the potential hazards of synthetic biology and other innovations. Faced with these challenges, regulators need a lodestar for what constitutes high-quality regulation and guidance on how to improve their organizations’ performance. In the book Achieving Regulatory Excellence, leading regulatory experts …

An Architectural Framework For Global Talent Management, Shad S. Morris, Scott Snell, Ingmar Björkman

Faculty Publications

A unique characteristic of the multinational corporation is that it consists of culturally diverse employees that embody both firm-specific and location-specific human capital. This paper takes an architectural approach to describe how different types of human capital develop from the individual level, to the unit level, and then to the firm level in order to build a talent portfolio for the multinational corporation. Depending on the company’s strategy (multidomestic, meganational, transnational), different configurations of the talent portfolio tend to be emphasized and integrated to achieve competitive advantage. Implications for theory and practice are discussed and a research agenda is introduced.

Firm-Specific Human Capital Investments As A Signal Of General Value: Revisiting Assumptions About Human Capital And How It Is Managed, Shad S. Morris, Sharon A. Alvarez, Jay B. Barney, Janice C. Molloy

Faculty Publications

Research Summary:

Prior scholarship has assumed that firm-specific and general human capital can be analyzed separately. This paper argues that, in some settings, this is not the case because prior firm-specific human capital investments can be a market signal of an individual’s willingness and ability to make such investments in the future. As such, the willingness and ability to make firm-specific investments is a type of general human capital that links firm-specific and general human capital in important ways. The paper develops theory about these investments, market signals, and value appropriation. Then the paper examines implications for human resource management …

Public Sector Personnel Economics: Wages, Promotions, And The Competence-Control Trade-Off, Charles M. Cameron, John De Figueiredo, David E. Lewis

Faculty Scholarship

We model personnel policies in public agencies, examining how wages and promotion standards can partially offset a fundamental contracting problem: the inability of public sector workers to contract on performance, and the inability of political masters to contract on forbearance from meddling. Despite the dual contracting problem, properly constructed personnel policies can encourage intrinsically motivated public sector employees to invest in expertise, seek promotion, remain in the public sector, and develop policy projects. However, doing so requires internal personnel policies that sort "slackers" from "zealots." Personnel policies that accomplish this task are quite different in agencies where acquired expertise has …