Spring

This module is concerned with the area of personnel economics and examines the importance of labour to organisations. It mainly focuses on the types of compensation packages that contemporary organisations offer their workers and also covers non-monetary forms of compensation

None

This module aims to analyse the ways in which organisations can design compensation packages to overcome agency problems as well as exploring the reasons why such a wide variety of these packages are observed in practice. The worker-firm employment relationship is examined in detail, especially the types of contract and forms of incentives that a organisation can offer to induce the requisite amount of effort from its workers at different levels of the organisational hierarchy

By the end of the module students will:

• Be able to apply standard labour economic principles to a range of personnel issues
• Recognise the importance of incentives and contracts in the design of remuneration packages
• Reconcile the main theoretical arguments in the area of personnel economics with recent empirical findings
• Make policy recommendations to encourage firms to adopt the appropriate compensation packages

   

The following topics are likely to be covered:-

• Labour demand and productivity
• The economic impact of training and trade unions
• Agency theory and deferred compensation
• Efficiency wages
• Individual variable pay schemes
• Executive compensation
• Promotions and tournaments
• Non-monetary compensation: the use of monetary equivalents
• Fridge benefits

Lectures (20 hrs)

Garibaldi, P. (2006), Personnel Economics in Imperfect Labor Markets, Oxford University Press
Lazear, E. (1998) Personnel Economics for Managers, Wiley 
Additional reading will be supplied throughout the module

10 March 2011