Benjamin A. Campbell

Encouraging Best Practice in Quantitative Management Research: An Incomplete List of Opportunities*

The paper identifies some common problems encountered in quantitative methodology and provides information on current best practice to resolve these problems. We first discuss issues pertaining to variable measurement and concerns regarding the underlying relationships among variables. We then highlight several advances in estimation methodology that may circumvent issues encountered in common practice. Finally, we discuss approaches that move beyond existing research designs, including the development and use of datasets that embody linkages across levels of analysis, or combine qualitative and quantitative methods.

Resetting the Shot Clock The Effect of Comobility on Human Capital

In this paper, we examine how employee mobility impacts the human capital of both those who are new to the organization (movers) and those who are existing members (incumbents). Employee mobility events can disrupt both the location-specific and the colleague-specific components of human capital and thus have different impacts on overall human capital. We test our theory on the disparate effects of location change and personnel change on human capital in the highly interdependent context of the National Basketball Association. We find that movers experience adverse performance shocks after mobility events that are moderated when moving as a group, and we also find that group mobility events hinder the performance improvement of incumbents. Our findings are consistent with the limited transfer of location-specific human capital and the disruption of colleague-specific human capital after mobility events.

The Impact of Technological Change on Work and Wages

This review begins with a discussion of how technology affects wage structures. The literature reviewed is divided into two segments - studies of the impact of technological change on wages (and growing inequality), productivity, and employment and studies of the interrelationship of technology, human resource systems, and labor productivity. We conclude with suggestions for future research topics. Overall, we find that technological change accounts for only part of the changing wage structure in the United States, whereas changes in institutional forces that affect the creation of industry rents and the distribution of rents are also an important factor.

Earnings Effects of Entrepreneurial Experience: Evidence from the Semiconductor Industry

Although previous studies have examined the rewards available to individuals inside entrepreneurial firms, entrepreneurial experience may provide rewards that are independent of the entrepreneurial context. Building on human capital theory, this study provides theoretical explanations for the effects of experience at a start-up on earnings across an individuals career and then examines these implications in the context of Californias semiconductor industry. Comparing the career trajectories of employees who join start-ups with a matched control group of comparable workers without start-up experience, I perform a counterfactual analysis and find that start-up experience in this context has a persistent positive effect on earnings that extend outside the entrepreneurial environment. The results from the matched sample are consistent with the development and revelation of valuable general human capital through entrepreneurial experience and suggest that the rewards to entrepreneurship are not limited to just the rewards available inside entrepreneurial firms. This paper was accepted by Lee Fleming, entrepreneurship and innovation.

What do I Take with Me: The Impact of Transfer and Replication of Resources on Parent and Spin-Out Firm Performance

Focusing on entrepreneurial ventures created by employees leaving a firm, our study examines the differential impact of knowledge transfer and knowledge spillovers on both parent and spin-out performance. While extant research often uses knowledge transfer and spillover interchangeably, our study distinguishes between the two based on the “rivalness” of the relevant knowledge. We theorize that both knowledge transfer (proxied by the size of the exiting employee team) and knowledge spillovers (proxied by the experience of the exiting employee team) will aid spin-out performance. However, knowledge transfer, being more rival, will have a greater adverse impact than knowledge spillovers on parent firm performance. Using U.S. Census Bureau linked employee-employer data from the legal services industry, we find support for our hypotheses. Our study thus contributes to extant literature by highlighting a key dimension of knowledge — rivalness — and the differential competitive dynamics effect of resources with varying degrees of rivalness.

Knowledge complementarities: human capital management and R&D investment in high-technology firms

This paper explores complementarities between human capital management strategies and Research and Development (R&D) strategies in high-technology firms. Using data on a large sample of electronics firms in seven states from an employer–employee matched dataset, we examine the relationship between firm-level R&D and firms’ human capital strategies. Our results indicate that firms with high R&D investment are more likely to implement externally focused human capital strategies, while firms with low R&D investment are more likely to implement internally focused human capital strategies. Further, firms that adopt both high R&D investment and an externally focused human capital management strategy show higher productivity than comparable firms that implement an internally focused strategy. Our findings provide evidence of complementarities between firm R&D and the absorption of knowledge embedded in externally sourced individual human capital.

Strategic human capital management in the context of cross-industry and within-industry mobility frictions

Covenants-not-to-compete play an important role in the strategic management of human capital because they have the dual effect of directing departing employees away from competitors and reducing mobility overall. We combine the literature on noncompetes with the literature on human capital transferability to develop a theory of how the enforceability of noncompetes differentially impacts the management of technical and business occupations. Using a difference-in-difference estimation strategy, we demonstrate that when noncompetes are more enforceable, their impact on new hire experience, wages, training, and tenure for technical employees is stronger than on business employees, which is in turn stronger than unaffected occupations. We argue that the heterogeneous responses to noncompete enforceability for technical and business occupations are consistent with cross-occupational differences in skill transferability.We develop and test a theory examining how frictions that restrict mobility across industries and frictions constraining mobility within an industry can co-occur to effectively isolate individual human capital, ultimately changing the firm’s make-versus-buy decision for human capital. Empirically, we demonstrate that when cross-industry frictions in the form of limited skill transferability and within-industry frictions in the form of noncompete enforceability are both present employees exhibit longer tenures, firms hire workers with less initial experience, firms change the amount and nature of training provided, and wages marginally increase. These findings suggest that sufficiently strong and complementary mobility frictions shift the emphasis of firms’ human capital management practices towards internal development of human capital relative to acquisition on the external market.

Examining Strategic Human Capital in the Context of Sports

The literature on strategic human capital has largely focused on the ability of firms to garner a resource-based competitive advantage through the management of human capital. A significant portion...

'Another Roof, Another Proof': How Mobility Explains Individual Productivity in Science

The mobility of highly skilled employees is seen as a critical way for organizations to transfer knowledge and to improve organizational performance. Yet, the relationship between mobility and individual performance is still largely a theoretical and empirical puzzle. Building both on human capital mobility research and economics of science literature, and exploiting a unique dataset of 348 academics working in biology department in the United Kingdom, we show that mobility has a positive effect on individual productivity. We also find that this positive effect is reinforced when academics move towards better-endowed institutions. We complement our econometrical analysis with more qualitative evidence from a survey.

Strategic Human Capital Management in the Context of Industry-Specific Skills and Within-Industry Mobility Barriers

Covenants-not-to-compete play an important role in the strategic management of human capital because they have the dual effect of directing departing employees away from competitors and reducing mobility overall. We combine the literature on noncompetes with the literature on human capital transferability to develop a theory of how the enforceability of noncompetes differentially impacts the management of technical and business occupations. Using a difference-in-difference estimation strategy, we demonstrate that when noncompetes are more enforceable, their impact on new hire experience, wages, training, and tenure for technical employees is stronger than on business employees, which is in turn stronger than unaffected occupations. We argue that the heterogeneous responses to noncompete enforceability for technical and business occupations are consistent with cross-occupational differences in skill transferability.We develop and test a theory examining how frictions that restrict mobility across industries and frictions constraining mobility within an industry can co-occur to effectively isolate individual human capital, ultimately changing the firm’s make-versus-buy decision for human capital. Empirically, we demonstrate that when cross-industry frictions in the form of limited skill transferability and within-industry frictions in the form of noncompete enforceability are both present employees exhibit longer tenures, firms hire workers with less initial experience, firms change the amount and nature of training provided, and wages marginally increase. These findings suggest that sufficiently strong and complementary mobility frictions shift the emphasis of firms’ human capital management practices towards internal development of human capital relative to acquisition on the external market.