The role of peers in estimating tenure-performance profiles: Evidence from personnel data

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. www.econstor.eu The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E SIZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author. In this paper, we estimate tenure-performance profiles using unique panel data that contain detailed information on individual workers' performance. We find that a 10 per cent increase in tenure leads to an increase in performance of 5.5 per cent of a standard deviation. This translates to an average performance increase of about 75 per cent within the first year of the employment relationship. Furthermore, we show that there are peer effects in learning onthe-job: Workers placed in teams with more experienced and thus more productive peers perform significantly better than those placed in teams with less experienced peers. An increase in the average team tenure by one standard deviation leads to an increase of 11 to 14 per cent of a standard deviation in performance.JEL Classification: J24, D24, L89

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“…Furthermore, firms offer different levels of learning opportunities and jobs differ widely in their learning potential ( Rosen, 1972;Heckman et al, 2002 ). 3 More recent empirical studies have emphasised that workers are continuously learning by doing and learning from other workers and that such knowledge spill-over has a positive effect on their productivity ( Destré et al, 2008;De Grip et al, 2016 ). In such settings, workers' human capital increases with tenure and converges towards the job's proficiency level and the firm's job-specific learning potential.…”

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“…Part of this article builds on [5]. Previous work of the author contains a larger number of background references for the material presented here and has been used intensively in all major parts of this article [1], [3], [9], [10], [12], [13].…”

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