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Economics

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University of Richmond

2013

Articles 1 - 17 of 17

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

The Wage Gap Vs. The Total Compensation Gap, Kevin F. Hallock Dec 2013

The Wage Gap Vs. The Total Compensation Gap, Kevin F. Hallock

Economics Faculty Publications

Clearly, most organizations seek to have fair and objective pay practices. And, as a check, they sometimes take a data-driven look inside their companies to consider whether employees of different demographic characteristics are paid similarly or if there is some pay gap. But most organizations only consider wages or salaries in looking for such gaps. Existing research on pay preferences, however, shows that employees can value differently different kinds of pay. There are many massive demographic surveys of individuals which record, along with wage and salary earnings, information on individuals' schooling, gender, race, work hours, occupation, geographic location, etc. These …

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Employee Choice Over Pay Mix, Kevin F. Hallock Nov 2013

Employee Choice Over Pay Mix, Kevin F. Hallock

Economics Faculty Publications

Suppose the company set the level of pay and then let employees choose the fractions they wanted as guaranteed salary, stock options and at-risk bonus. The fraction in at-risk bonus was capped at 20% of total pay and the payout was between 0 and 2.5 times the amount put at-risk and was a function of individual and group performance. This is not a theoretical example; it's real. And, it is interesting for a variety of reasons, including that it is so extreme and because the organization invited some researchers inside to study the fascinating choices made by employees. They were …

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Compensation Research Summer Camp, Kevin F. Hallock Aug 2013

Compensation Research Summer Camp, Kevin F. Hallock

Economics Faculty Publications

This summer, the Institute for Compensation Studies at Cornell's ILR School hosted its first Emerging Scholars Conference, which the author affectionately calls Comp Camp. Their conference, funded in part by WorldatWork, hosted a dozen junior scholars, three PhD students, a few senior scholars and some leaders from the practical world (including some from WorldatWork). They convened experts from fields like sociology, psychology, economics, industrial relations and business on the Cornell campus in Ithaca, NY, for robust discussions of several as-yet-unpublished research studies. The conference had three interesting papers on gender by scholars from three fields using data from three countries. …

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Compensation Tournaments, Kevin F. Hallock Jul 2013

Compensation Tournaments, Kevin F. Hallock

Economics Faculty Publications

From beach volleyball and soccer to tennis and golf to playoffs for the Little League World Series, tournament play has lessons for workplace compensation. A tournament scheme can motivate workers the same if workers are risk neutral. A rich place to study tournament pay, performance, output, effort and the like is professional golf, because so much is measured. Great data are available on the incentive structure; for example, the distance in dollars between the first place price and the second place prize, and the distance in dollars between the second place prize and the third place prize, and so on.

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Ceo Pay And Layoffs, Kevin F. Hallock Jun 2013

Ceo Pay And Layoffs, Kevin F. Hallock

Economics Faculty Publications

Whether CEO pay is linked with job loss or mass layoffs is not really a new question. The study that got the author started, and raised very interesting issues about job loss and compensation, looked at CEOs at a few dozen companies over one year. Separating companies into those that made a layoff announcement in the previous year and those that didn't, you will find that the CEOs who made at least one large layoff the previous year make a lot more than those who made no layoffs in the previous year. But, once one starts controlling for company and …

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Baseball And Thoughts On Pay Dispersion In Teams, Kevin F. Hallock May 2013

Baseball And Thoughts On Pay Dispersion In Teams, Kevin F. Hallock

Economics Faculty Publications

The author really likes thinking about compensation, and he really likes thinking about baseball. He loves it when he can watch baseball and think about compensation. Some baseball teams pay relatively evenly across the team and others have wide dispersion (some players are paid at the league minimum and others are earning "superstar" rewards). There is research on whether teams with one of those strategies is relatively better off (in terms of, say, wins or profits) than the other, even after controlling for total payroll, players' quality and the like. A great virtue of studying baseball -- and perhaps one …

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Pay In Nonprofits, Kevin F. Hallock Apr 2013

Pay In Nonprofits, Kevin F. Hallock

Economics Faculty Publications

In the US, April 21-April 27 is National Volunteer Week, a time to recognize all those who work without pay to support important missions or causes championed by nonprofits. Many of the issues that come up when designing pay systems in for-profits (strategy, internal equity, performance, motivation, fairness, transparency, etc.) are as important to consider in nonprofits as they are in for-profits. But some of the facts and issues differ. Using a sample of data from the 2000 US Census of Population about approximately 3 million people between the ages of 16 and 65 who worked full year and full …

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Why Isn't China Exporting Automobiles? : A Model Of Technology Adoption, Nianchen Han Apr 2013

Why Isn't China Exporting Automobiles? : A Model Of Technology Adoption, Nianchen Han

Honors Theses

In modern times, the automobile industry has become a relatively labor intensive industry as compared to other industries such as the food processing industry orIT industry. Normally, several people are involved in each process of an automobile production line. However, for a food processing firm such as a bottled water firm, it only takes a few people to control the huge machine in the factory. Under the Heckscher-Ohlin theorem’s assumption, a country will operate an industry that is intensive in its abundant resource. That means a labor abundant country will produce labor intensive goods and a capital abundant country will …

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Valuing Employee Stock Options, Kevin F. Hallock Mar 2013

Valuing Employee Stock Options, Kevin F. Hallock

Economics Faculty Publications

It helps to remember that employee options and market-traded options are quite different. The difference between them makes valuing employee options more complicated, but it also offers a lesson about how the employer's cost for a given piece of the total rewards package may not be the same as its value to a given employee. Organizations too often miss this and, as a result, can find themselves leaving money on the table. A stock option is the right to buy a share of stock at a specific price (called the strike or exercise price) at some point in the future. …

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Pay And Relative Income Within Couples, Kevin F. Hallock Feb 2013

Pay And Relative Income Within Couples, Kevin F. Hallock

Economics Faculty Publications

In "U.S. Labor Market Challenges Over the Longer Term," labor economist David Autor shows that the fraction of young adults who are currently married plummeted, dropping by 30% to 70% depending on gender, education and race/ethnicity (paper prepared for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, 2010). At the same time, women's labor earnings have steadily increased. An interesting and provocative new working paper, "Gender Identity and Relative Income Within Households", by Marianne Bertrand, Emir Kamenica and Jessica Pan (working paper, November 2012), tries to determine how these two trends are related. One of the things Bertrand, Kamenica and Pan focus …

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Stakeholder Theory, Value, And Firm Performance, Jeffrey S. Harrison, Andrew C. Wicks Jan 2013

Stakeholder Theory, Value, And Firm Performance, Jeffrey S. Harrison, Andrew C. Wicks

Management Faculty Publications

This paper argues that the notion of value has been overly simplified and narrowed to focus on economic returns. Stakeholder theory provides an appropriate lens for considering a more complex perspective of the value that stakeholders seek as well as new ways to measure it. We develop a four-factor perspective for defining value that includes, but extends beyond, the economic value stakeholders seek. To highlight its distinctiveness, we compare this perspective to three other popular performance perspectives. Recommendations are made regarding performance measurement for both academic researchers and practitioners. The stakeholder perspective on value offered in this paper draws attention …

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Economics As Applied Ethics: Value Judgements In Welfare Economics By Wilfred Beckerman (Book Review), Jonathan B. Wight Jan 2013

Economics As Applied Ethics: Value Judgements In Welfare Economics By Wilfred Beckerman (Book Review), Jonathan B. Wight

Economics Faculty Publications

This is a well-written textbook geared to advanced undergraduate or graduate students of economics, many of whom are largely and regrettably innocent of the ethical problems inherent in conventional economic analysis. It compares with Daniel M. Hausman and Michael S. McPherson’s Economic analysis, moral philosophy, and public policy (2006) and Johan J. Graafland’s Economics, ethics, and the market: introduction and applications (2007). The book presupposes a fair amount of knowledge in both economics and ethics (it does not intend to be a primer in either). The author is professor emeritus at Balliol College, Oxford and honorary visiting professor of economics …

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Presidential Pay, Kevin F. Hallock Jan 2013

Presidential Pay, Kevin F. Hallock

Economics Faculty Publications

Last month, the author wrote about athletes' pay relative to CEOs' pay and he invoked Babe Ruth's famous line justifying being paid more than Pres Herbert Hoover because Ruth had had "a better year." This month, Pres Barack Obama will be sworn in for a second term. His annual salary will be $400,000. Of course, compensation is about a lot more than wages and salaries in most jobs, and it is no different for the president of the US. Consider that the president enjoys a $50,000 "expense allowance" that is not taxed. There are also rewards after leaving office. Again, …

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Data Improvement And Labor Economics, Kevin F. Hallock Jan 2013

Data Improvement And Labor Economics, Kevin F. Hallock

Economics Faculty Publications

The expansion of available data for research has transformed empirical labor economics over the past generation. This paper briefly highlights some of the changes and describes a few examples of papers that illustrate the advances. It also documents the changing ways data have been used in the Journal of Labor Economics over the past 30 years, including a trend toward a higher fraction of papers using any data and, among those papers using any data, a higher fraction using nonpublic data, a higher fraction using international data, and more frequent use of multiple data sources. Finally, this paper describes work …

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Sustainable What? An Overview And Assessment Of "Sustainable Development", Jeffrey K. Hass Jan 2013

Sustainable What? An Overview And Assessment Of "Sustainable Development", Jeffrey K. Hass

Sociology and Anthropology Faculty Publications

Occasionally an academic term becomes a meme in broader media and popular discourse. Among such terms are "stagflation", "globalization", and the concept that this chapter and volume addresses: "sustainable development". Like many other such terms, this concept implies an important subject and broad outlines of research programs and policy initiatives. Yet while provoking consideration of important and often uneasy issues, such a term can also mystify or deflects attention from other related issues. Given the clear evidence of global warming trends and the costs of environmental degradation, the eventuality of peak oil and increasing demand for increasingly scarce fossil fuels …

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Political Culture Of Post-Soviet Economic Change: The Case Of Financial-Industrial Groups, Jeffrey K. Hass Jan 2013

Political Culture Of Post-Soviet Economic Change: The Case Of Financial-Industrial Groups, Jeffrey K. Hass

Sociology and Anthropology Faculty Publications

Beneath the seeming chaos and conflict of Russia's post-socialist experience were structured dynamics of contentious reconstruction of fields (collective relations of power and culture institutionalized as authority and definitions of "normal"). This essay argues that the Russian experience was driven in no small part by contention over remaking core meanings and authority of field relations, practices, and boundaries. Contention over field reconstruction emerged as three groups' interests and taken-for granted meanings of normality collided: those of Soviet-era managers, a new class of financial entrepreneurs and elites, and state elites and officials. Post-socialism has been a story of competing elite culture …

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Queen Elizabeth’S Leadership Abroad: The Netherlands In The 1570s, Peter Iver Kaufman Jan 2013

Queen Elizabeth’S Leadership Abroad: The Netherlands In The 1570s, Peter Iver Kaufman

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

In 1576, after Edmund Grindal, archbishop of Canterbury, presumed to lecture Queen Elizabeth on the importance of preaching and on her duty to listen to such lectures, his influence diminished precipitously, and leadership of the established English church fell to Bishop Aylmer. Grindal’s friends on the queen’s Privy Council, “forward” Calvinists (or ultra-Protestants), were powerless to save him from the consequences of his indiscretion, which damaged the ultras’ other initiatives’ chances of success. This paper concerns one of those initiatives. From the late 1560s, they urged their queen “actively” to intervene in the Dutch wars. They collaborated with Calvinists on …

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