Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Business Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 9 of 9

Full-Text Articles in Business

Sabbaticals, Kevin F. Hallock Dec 2014

Sabbaticals, Kevin F. Hallock

Economics Faculty Publications

With the year end upon you and many workplaces closing, reducing hours or accommodating employee vacations because of the holidays, this column focuses on rewards in the form of time away from work that is not so common -- sabbaticals. Sabbaticals are a generous benefit to those workers who have them. And they can clearly be an important part of a total rewards package. According to inc.com, while 5% of firms in the US offer sabbaticals, 25% of the companies listed in "Best Companies to Work For" offer them. Corporate sabbaticals, however, aren't typically as generous in length as those …


Retention Pay, Kevin F. Hallock Nov 2014

Retention Pay, Kevin F. Hallock

Economics Faculty Publications

In many seasonal jobs, such as store clerks during the holiday shopping season, retention is about employers wanting as little employee turnover as possible during the small window they have each year to earn a big part of their profits. One way seasonal businesses might persuade workers to stay is with some sort of cash bonus paid for staying until the season's end or by paying a substantially higher wage at the very end. While the summer beach of Cape Cod may feel worlds away from the corporate office, the need to consider retention strategies for key employees is universal. …


Pay, Corporate Location And Donations To Charity, Kevin F. Hallock Sep 2014

Pay, Corporate Location And Donations To Charity, Kevin F. Hallock

Economics Faculty Publications

State and local governments direct a great deal of effort (and resources) toward incenting companies to locate in their particular jurisdictions. The cited reasons for this effort are often the increase in jobs and boost to the local tax base. In "The Geography of Giving: The Effect of Corporate Headquarters on Local Charities", David Card, Enrico Moretti and the author investigated a number of issues related to the geographical location of corporate headquarters and charitable giving. It turns out that location does matter and the movement of highly paid employees does, too. There are at least two main channels through …


Paying To Put Out Fires, Kevin F. Hallock Aug 2014

Paying To Put Out Fires, Kevin F. Hallock

Economics Faculty Publications

There is surprisingly little academic work on the compensation of firefighters. This may be, in part, because their wages are often set by collective bargaining agreements and that those paid as firefighters are regularly paid by seniority. But many aspects of the labor market can still be studied through this interesting occupation, including labor unions, compensation for job risk and even volunteerism. Consider the mountains of papers on Fortune 500 CEOs relative to the number (500) of employees doing this job in the US. In contrast, consider the tiny number of papers on firefighters relative to the large numbers who …


Ceo Pay Over The Very Long Run, Kevin F. Hallock Jul 2014

Ceo Pay Over The Very Long Run, Kevin F. Hallock

Economics Faculty Publications

Recent work by economic historians shows people that while CEO pay has risen dramatically since the 1990s, such a trend was all but nonexistent from World War II through the mid-1970s. Imagine coming upon an article in a prestigious business publication titled "Another Decade of Deterioration in Top Executive Pay Compared to the Economy as a Whole." Its author, Arch Patton, reports data from a set of more than 400 "top managers" from 1953-1964. What is particularly startling is the size of the deterioration relative to the average. People know from piles of recent evidence that executive compensation has increased …


Incentive Compensation For Ministers?, Kevin F. Hallock Jun 2014

Incentive Compensation For Ministers?, Kevin F. Hallock

Economics Faculty Publications

Paying leaders of for-profit organizations is difficult. And this is even the case when there is some agreement regarding the objectives of the organizations (e.g., returns to shareholders in publicly held companies). But as they step away from the most obvious objective of maximizing shareholder return or profit, things can get more complicated. Three authors shed considerable light on this by using a rich data set of more than 2,000 Methodist ministers over 43 years. To be sure, the data are from one specific religious group in one region of the US, but the data are absolutely extraordinary. In "Is …


Tipping, Technology And Lessons In Compensation Design, Kevin F. Hallock May 2014

Tipping, Technology And Lessons In Compensation Design, Kevin F. Hallock

Economics Faculty Publications

New technologies seem to be popping up everywhere to make it easier for customers to exercise their power to pay. From personal phone apps to iPad kiosks in restaurants to video screens in taxis, a tip amount is instantly calculated for you just choose the percent or level you wish to tip. All this technological assistance on tipping is also creating exciting, new data sources. Increasingly, labor economists and other social scientists are using such data sources to better understand how people respond to incentives and the resulting workplace implications. The tipping examples described in this article offer some interesting …


What Have You Done For Me Lately?, Kevin F. Hallock Apr 2014

What Have You Done For Me Lately?, Kevin F. Hallock

Economics Faculty Publications

The author considers the question of whether some occupations or pay plans can create incentives to strategically time employees' best performance and what problems that might create. There certainly is plenty of evidence across a set of industries that the timing of performance can have real effects on the compensation of employees. To the extent that this gives employees (athletes, salespeople, executives, and others) incentives to shift the timing of effort in ways that may not be in the best interests of the employer, shareholders, and other constituents is certainly something worth thinking about if you want to better curb …


Titles As Compensation, Kevin F. Hallock Jan 2014

Titles As Compensation, Kevin F. Hallock

Economics Faculty Publications

Wages and salaries are just part of total rewards. Insurance, vacation time, bonuses, and working conditions are other important forms of compensation. Each of these costs the organization something. But there are other attributes of jobs -- less easily measured in dollars -- that employees value. These can include colleagues, company reputation, and even job titles. At the margin it is possible to imagine a tradeoff between a higher salary and a job title. In fact, some have argued that some firms offer titles in absence of raises where salary budgets are slim. When thinking about job titles as a …