Lisa M. Lynch

How to Compete: The Impact of Workplace Practices and Information Technology on Productivity

Using data from a unique nationally representative sample of businesses, we examine the impact of workplace practices, information technology, and human capital investments on productivity. We estimate an augmented Cobb-Douglas production function with both cross section and panel data covering the period of 19871993, using both within and GMM estimators. We find that it is not whether an employer adopts a particular work practice but rather how that work practice is actually implemented within the establishment that is associated with higher productivity. Unionized establishments that have adopted human resource practices that promote joint decision making coupled with incentive-based compensation have higher productivity than other similar nonunion plants, whereas unionized businesses that maintain more traditional labor management relations have lower productivity. Finally, plant productivity is higher in businesses with more-educated workers or greater computer usage by nonmanagerial employees.

What’s Driving the New Economy?: The Benefits of Workplace Innovation

This paper argues that changes in workplace organisation, including re-engineering, teams, incentive pay and employee voice, have been a significant component of the turnaround in productivity growth in the US during the 1990s. Our work goes beyond measuring the impact of computers on productivity and finds that these types of workplace innovation appear to explain a large part of the movement in multi-factor productivity in the US over the period 1993-6. These results suggest additional dimensions to the recent productivity growth in the US that may well have implications for productivity growth potential in Europe.

State dependency in youth unemployment: A lost generation?

Abstract Utilizing a job search framework and survey data on both completed and uncompleted spells of unemployment we present in this paper maximum likelihood estimates of the determinants of re-employment probabilities of young workers in Britain. The model used allows us to examine the importance of state dependency in youth unemployment as well as ethnicity, educational qualifications, and unemployment income. Results suggest that there is strong evidence of negative duration dependence in the transition from unemployment to employment for young workers in Britain.

Entry-level jobs: First rung on the employment ladder or economic dead end?

The ability of young workers to move from dead-end jobs into higher-wage jobs which have better career prospects is greatly influenced by the individual’s characteristics, local labor market conditions, and his or her human capital. This paper examines the characteristics of entry-level jobs of young workers in the 1980s with emphasis on how education and training influence the types of jobs held. The incidence of post-school training is quite low even though all types of post-school training raise wages significantly. Company-provided training reduces the probability that a young worker will leave his or her employer, while off-the-job training increases the ability of employees, especially young women, to move out of a dead-end job.

Determinants of the decertification process: Evidence from employer-initiated elections

There have been relatively few studies on why workers choose to decertify a union as their bargaining unit and virtually no empirical studies on the outcomes of employer-initiated representation elections. Using data from the NLRB monthly election reports (1977–1981), we attempt to analyze the factors that seem to influence the outcomes of employer-initiated representation elections with an incumbent union. Variables in our analysis include size of the election unit, region, industrial classification, type of incumbent union, and the state of the local economy. While the data show a concentration of elections on the West Coast, there is no significant difference in the ability of unions there to “win” decertification elections.

The Evolving Nature of High Performance Workplace Practices in the United States

Using a unique longitudinal survey of employers in the United States during the 1990s, this chapter examines the trends and factors associated with how businesses have invested in high performance workplace practices. The specific workplace practices examined include shared rewards, job rotation, workforce training, employee involvement in problem solving, and self-managed employee teams. The incidence and diffusion of innovative workplace practices such as these varies over time but not in a unidirectional way. Employers with a more external focus and broader networks to learn about best practices are more likely to have extensively invested in these types of workplace practices. The educational quality of the workforce and investments in physical capital, especially information technology, appear to be complementary with a range of workplace practices. However, the association between unionization and workplace practices is mixed. Unionized establishments are more likely to train their employees but nonunionized establishments are more likely to have engaged a higher fraction of their nonmanagerial workers in problem solving. Finally, for employers in the manufacturing sector, past profits tend to be positively associated with more extensive investments in high performance workplace practices.

Workplace Skill Accumulation and its Impact on Earnings and Labor Mobility: The U.S. Experience

This paper shifts the discussion in this conference from issues related to human capital creation provided by formal education, to the determinants and outcomes of human capital accumulation that occurs in the workplace after formal schooling has been completed. In recent years this type of human capital creation has received an increasing amount of attention in the U.S. for three main reasons. First, growing international competition has forced firms around the world to identify ways in which they can increase the productivity of their labor inputs. Since labor productivity growth has been much slower in the U.S. than in other countries policies which might stimulate higher productivity growth in the U.S. are viewed as crucial for economic competitiveness. Second, rapid changes in technology, especially in the area of information technology, have resulted in the massive retraining of workers and substantial changes in the skill requirements of workers. This has been felt in all sectors but particularly in industries such as telecommunications. Finally, changing work organizations associated with the switch to “just-in-time” production from “just-in-case” production has resulted in workers rotating through a wider number of jobs. Consequently, they are being trained on-the-job in a wider set of skills. In addition, as firms decrease the number of layers within the organization and push more decisions down on to the line, workers need to have broader abilities to take on these new responsibilities.

Training and the Private Sector: International Comparisons

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