This article analyzes the costs and benefits of job rotation as a mechanism with which the firm can learn about the employees' productivities and the profitability of different jobs or activities. I compare job rotation to an assignment policy where employees specialize in one job along their career. The gains from adopting a job rotation policy are larger when there is more prior uncertainty about employees and activities. I argue that this firm learning theory fits the existing evidence on rotation better than alternative explanations based on employee motivation and employee learning.Job Rotation, Learning

This paper tests three possible explanations for why firms adopt job rotation: They focus on establishment characteris tics instead. Analyses of job rotation based on individual data are more unusual be cause they often require access to person nel records, which firms are rarely willing to grant. Moreover, those studies that are based on personnel records typically are

Using a large data set of Western European employees, I examine two sets of reasons behind employers' decisions to give discretion: performance concerns (firms give discretion in order to improve performance) and family concerns (firms wish to improve the employees' work-family balance). I find more support for the former than for the latter. Discretion is positively related to the use of "high-performance" work practices and to employee position and ability, and is smaller in larger establishments, which suggests that loss of control matters to employers. Evidence about family concerns is less compelling. Female participation in the labor force has a positive effect on discretion over work schedules, but women have less discretion than men, and employees with small children do not have more discretion than other employees. Large and governmental organizations, which are expected to care more about work-family balance, do not offer more discretion over work schedules than other types of organizations.

The goal of this study was to identify the determinants of direct employee participation in organizations across Europe. Some factors were predicted to be related to levels of participation in general, namely, competition, sector, the pursuit of a differentiation strategy based on either quality or service, and indirect participation. Two additional factors were expected to be differentially related to two forms of direct participation: consultation and delegation. These factors were organizational size and the pursuit of a cost leadership business strategy. The hypothesized relationships were contrasted using data from the EPOC survey, a representative survey of over 5,700 organizations located in 10 European Union countries. The results supported 11 of the 14 predicted relationships. # Else ier cience nc All ri hts reser e

With more power, a manager can make more decisions or more important ones, and in this way have more impact on his firm. As a consequence, firm performance provides more information about the abilities of more powerful managers, who are more "visible". In this paper I analyze how the allocation of power in the firm affects the managers' career concerns when no manager's power can be increased without reducing another manager's. I show that, with a simple linear technology and risk-neutral managers, it is generally optimal to divide power in an unequal way, even though this may create conflicts of interest between managers. I also analyze how optimal pay-forperformance schemes should depend on the allocation of power.