Valérie Smeets

Incentives, Sorting and Productivity along the Career: Evidence from a Sample of Top Economists

In this paper we study empirically the labor market of economists. We look at the mobility and promotion patterns of a sample of 1,000 top economists over thirty years and link it to their productivity and other personal characteristics. We find that the probability of promotion and of upward mobility is positively related to past production. However, the sensitivity of promotion and mobility to production diminishes with experience, indicating the presence of a learning process. We also find evidence that economists respond to incentives. They tend to exert more effort at the beginning of their career when dynamic incentives are important. This finding is robust to the introduction of tenure, which has an additional negative ex post impact on production. Our results indicate therefore that both promotions and tenure have an effect on the provision of incentives. Finally, we detect evidence of a sorting process, as the more productive individuals are allocated to the higher ranked universities. Copyright 2006, Oxford University Press.

Stars War in French Gastronomy: Prestige of Restaurants and Chefs' Careers

In this paper, we analyze the careers from a sample of more than 1,000 top French chefs over more than twenty years and link it to the success or reputation of the restaurants where they have worked. This allows us to test what are the determinants of success but also to investigate the dynamics of performance and reputation, stressing the importance of the quality of apprenticeships, mentoring and entrepreneurship spirit. We find that the prestige of the restaurant where individuals work is on average declining along the career, and that the quality of apprenticeship is strongly related to the future success as chef. We also find that prices of restaurants with higher reputation are more sensitive to bad signals.

Testing Models of Hierarchy: Span of Control, Compensation and Career Dynamics

In this paper, we test implications from various theories of hierarchies in organizations, in particular the assignment model (Rosen, 1982), the incentives model (Rosen, 1986), the supervision model (Qian, 1994) and the knowledge- based hierarchy model (Garicano, 2000; Garicano and Rossi-Hansberg, 2006). We use a unique dataset providing personnel records from a large European firm in an high tech manufacturing industry from January 1997 to May 2004. An unusually rare feature of this dataset is that relationships within the hierarchy are reported and we can therefore identify the chain of command. Some of our results are in line with the Garicano and Rossi-Hansberg (2006) model of hierarchies when communication costs are decreasing: we observe an increase in the span, an increase in wage inequality between job levels, and the introduction of a new hierarchical level. However, we also find evidence of learning and reallocation of talent within and across job levels, a finding that can not be explained by a static model of knowledge based hierarchy but rather by dynamic models of careers in organizations (e.g. Gibbons and Waldman, 1999). We then propose a new model of hierarchies where individuals accumulate general and managerial human capital on the job, and firms learn gradually about individuals managerial ability and allocate managers to span according to their expected effective ability. This theory explains our empirical findings and provides a richer theory of careers in hierarchie