Entirely New Working Paper Approach

4 May 2011 at 1:28 pm Lasse 3 comments

| Lasse Lien |

Here’s a new WP of mine (with T. Hillestad). Check out the sublimely boring title. We figure that the more boring we can make the title, the better what follows will appear. Earlier I have tended to do it the other way around, i.e. fancy title and intensely boring thereafter.

Recession, HR and Change

We document how the recession in the wake of the financial crisis created a general surge in pro-change attitudes and behavior. Next, we examine variation across firms with respect to this change boost. In particular we focus on how and why a firm’s use of HR-measures such as training, pay changes and layoffs matters. We find that training and layoffs increases the relative size of the effect, while pay cuts reduce it. We make sense of these findings by looking at managers’ choice among HR-measures as a signal used by employees to determine their employment risk. The level of employment risk is in turn linked to employees’ investments in change in a nonlinear, U-shaped fashion.

Entry filed under: - Lien -, Papers, Strategic Management.

Mitch on Hoselitz The Prisoners’ Dilemma in Fiction

3 Comments Add your own

1. Rafe Champion | 5 May 2011 at 7:09 pm

WH Hutt went for longer titles. “The Theory of Collective Bargaining” (1930) was subtitled “A critique of the argument that trade unions neutralise labour’s ‘disadvantage’ in bargaining and enhance wage-rates by the use, or threat, of strikes”.

And “Politically Impossible: An Essay on the Supposed Electoral Obstacles Impeding the Translation of Economic Analysis into Policy”.
2. Henri | 6 May 2011 at 1:32 am

When I first read: “the recession in the wake of the financial crisis created a general surge in pro-change attitudes and behavior”, my reaction was to consider whether the new term for being really scared is “pro-change attitudes”.

I am supervising some M.Sc. students who continuously fail to heed my advice. I think I will try to instill some pro-change attitudes to them today. Unable to employ HR practices for signaling, I guess I have to do with some heavy duty rhetoric.
3. Lasse | 6 May 2011 at 12:20 pm

Rafe: With a title like that I guess you can proceed directly to summary and conclusions

Henri: How about shouting? That is a HR practice we unfortunately did not have data on. It might be useful in your situation, though :-)