Why Employee Retention is More Complicated Than You Think
CBS Professor Adina Sterling researches how an employee’s decision to leave can be tied to their race—and their access to resources.
CBS Professor Adina Sterling researches how an employee’s decision to leave can be tied to their race—and their access to resources.
New research from Professor Adina Sterling finds that employees leave jobs at similar rates but for different reasons.
Professor Stephan Meier and Todd Jick reveal how managers can set up employees for success in the new world of work.
Columbia Business School research finds Black and white workers quit jobs for different reasons, highlighting racial disparities
Research by CBS Professor Glenn Hubbard uncovers the impact of pandemic-era unemployment assistance on larger labor market dynamics.
In this session of More MPE, we focus on an issue that bedevils many business leaders: Should they speak out on socio-political issues? Host Professor Ray Horton speaks with Professor Vanessa Burbano on how her award-winning research addresses the question.
CBS Professor Brett House examines the influence the latest batch of economic reports may have on the Fed's next moves.
New research from CBS Professors Vanessa Burbano and Stephan Meier reveals that pay is just one of the gaps between genders in Edge.
Christian is the Sidney Taurel Associate Professor within the Finance and Economics Division at Columbia Business School. His research focuses on macroeconomics and labor economics, with additional interests in public economics. The common theme behind his research is to understand the determinants of earnings inequality and the role redistributive policies. Before joining Columbia, Christian received a Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University where he was named a Fellow of Woodrow Wilson Scholars and was awarded the Towbes Prize for Outstanding Teaching.
Tommaso Porzio is the Daniel W. Stanton Associate Professor (untenured) of macroeconomics in the Economics Division at Columbia Business School. His research primarily studies the role of human capital for growth and economic development with a focus on understanding the barriers that may prevent individuals from exploiting their talent. His work has been published in the American Economic Review, Econometrica, and the Journal of Political Economy.
Professor Sicherman analyzes the roles of education, job training, occupational and job mobility, moonlighting and retirement in the formation of careers. He currently studies the various effects of technological change on the U.S. labor market. In addition, Sicherman works with different medical groups on using cost-benefit analysis in medical decision making. A faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, he is the recipient of research grants from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Labor and the Citicorp Behavioral Science Research Council.
Pierre Yared is the MUTB Professor of International Business, Senior Vice Dean for Faculty Affairs, and Vice Dean for Executive Education at Columbia Business School. His research, which has been published in leading academic journals, focuses on macroeconomic policy and political economy. He is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Yared teaches Global Economic Environment, a Core MBA course in macroeconomics for which he received the Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence.
Mabel Abraham is the Barbara and Meyer Feldberg Associate Professor of Business at Columbia Business School and a faculty affiliate of the Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Center for Leadership and Ethics. She teaches the MBA elective course on Power, Influence, and Networks and PhD seminars on Organizational Theory. She earned her PhD and MS in Management from the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Matthias Breuer is an Associate Professor of Business in the Accounting Division of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business. In his research, he examines issues of corporate transparency and information verification, with a particular focus on the role of regulation in addressing corporate information issues. His research has been recognized with multiple awards (e.g., the 2019 and 2021 Best Paper Awards of the American Accounting Association’s FARS Midyear Meetings), presented at leading universities and conferences, and published in reputable journals (e.g., the
David has over 15 years of experience investing in distressed, special situations and all-weather credit strategies, including as a Partner and Portfolio Manager of Standard General, LP. and Sunago Capital Partners LP. He also serves as Executive Chairman of Turning Point Brands, Inc. (NYSE: TPB), a Director of National Cinemedia, Inc.
Daniel (Dongil) Keum is an Associate Professor of Management at Columbia Business School. His research interests lie in innovation, organizational structure, labor market policy, and their application to public policy formation. He holds a PhD from NYU Stern School of Business and an AB with high honors in economics and mathematics from Dartmouth College. Prior to pursuing a career in academia, Daniel worked at McKinsey & Company for four years. His primary industry experience is in retail, fashion, and corporate portfolio restructuring.
Jonah E. Rockoff is Paul Garrett Professor of Public Policy and Business Responsibility at the Columbia Graduate School of Business and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Professor Rockoff's interests center on the finance and management of public schools. His most recent research focuses on systems for hiring new teachers, the effects of No Child Left Behind on students and schools, the impact of removing school desegregation orders, and how primary school teachers affect students' outcomes in early adulthood. He received his Ph.D.
Laura Boudreau is an Assistant Director at Columbia Business School. Laura received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on working conditions, labor market institutions, and firm productivity in developing countries. She is especially interested in how the intersection of global supply chains with local institutions affect firms’ and workers’ outcomes.
Vanessa Burbano is the Donald C. Waite III Associate Professor of Social Enterprise in the strategy area at Columbia Business School.
Professor Bartel is the Merrill Lynch Professor of Workforce Transformation at Columbia Business School and the Director of Columbia Business School's Workforce Transformation Initiative. She is an expert in the fields of labor economics and human resource management and has published numerous articles on employee training, human capital investments, job mobility, and the impact of technological change on productivity, worker skills, and outsourcing decisions. Bartel received the 1992 Margaret Chandler Award for Commitment to Excellence in teaching.
Many state and local governments incentivize new business creation. I analyze local growth policy in a setting where firm entry and expansion choices exhibit local complementarities, creating dynamic misallocation at the aggregate level. Optimal entry subsidies would speed the transition of Rust-belt workers to the South and Mountain West by an extra 10 million people by 2035, raising real incomes by 4%. Actual subsidies substantially worsen misallocation, lowering welfare by 3%, 6 times the size of the subsidies themselves.
Although there have been numerous studies on voluntary departure—i.e., quit behavior—the way race influences voluntary departure is not yet settled. Some studies suggest racial minorities are more apt to voluntarily depart than non-minority employees due to discrimination in the workplace. Other studies suggest racial minorities are more apt to stay due to discrimination in the labor market.
Screening human capital based on signals such as job applications or entrepreneurial pitches is crucial for organizations. Signals are informative insofar as they are costly. Generative AI (GAI) complicates screening by lowering the cost of producing impressive signals. We model the informational effects of GAI, showing that applicants' use of GAI can increase-but also decrease-an evaluator's screening mistakes. This result depends on how GAI affects experts' signals compared to non-experts'.
How can we measure the extent to which data-intensive firms are using their market power? Economists typically look to markups as evidence of market power. Using a simple model with firms that price risk in their capital allocation and production decisions, we highlight the competing forces that make markups an unreliable measure of data-derived market power. Instead, we show how markups measured at different levels of aggregation reflect data and distinguish data from other intangible investments.
Gamified training is a novel management control system in which companies use gamification techniques to engage and motivate employees to learn. This study empirically examines the performance consequences of gamified training using data from a natural field experiment in a professional services firm. We find that, on average, the main effect of adopting the gamified training platform on performance is significantly positive. We also study whether outcomes depend on how engaged the office is in the gamified training platform (i.e.
As unfunded pension liabilities grow, governments experiment with ways to curb costs. We examine the effect of a representative cost-cutting reform on the retention and productivity of workers. The reform reduced pension annuities and increased penalties for early retirement, projected to save 8 percent of revenues. We leverage administrative records and a discontinuity in the reform to estimate its effect on labor supply. The reform slightly increased worker retention, and we can rule out small attrition effects. The reform had no effect on worker output.
An important challenge for many firms is to identify the life transitions of its customers, such as job searching, expecting a child, or purchasing a home. Inferring such transitions, which are generally unobserved to the firm, can offer the firms opportunities to be more relevant to their customers. In this paper, we demonstrate how a social network platform can leverage its longitudinal user data to identify which of its users are likely to be job seekers. Identifying job seekers is at the heart of the business model of professional social network platforms.
Employee misconduct is costly to organizations and has the potential to be even more common in gig and remote work contexts, in which workers are physically distant from their employers. There is, thus, a need for scholars to better understand what employers can do to mitigate misconduct in these nontraditional work environments, particularly as the prevalence of such work environments is increasing.