Organizations, Personnel, and Internal Labor Markets

A ten-week advanced special topic in labor economics

How do firms recruit people, allocate work, learn about performance, provide incentives, develop skills, and retain employees? This course treats the organization as a system of labor-allocation decisions rather than as a single production function. It connects worker-level behavior to managers, teams, career ladders, and external labor-market opportunities.

The course is designed for students who want to conduct theory-guided applied research. Each week connects an intuitive economic framework to empirical papers, data construction, identification, and the interpretation of productivity, pay, career, and welfare outcomes. The opening intellectual map draws on personnel-economics foundations and recent syntheses of people, practices, productivity, and managers Lazear & Shaw, 2007Hoffman & Stanton, 2025Benson & Shaw, 2025.

Prerequisites¶

Graduate microeconomics and applied econometrics, including regression, panel data, experiments, and the distinction between descriptive and causal evidence. Familiarity with labor supply, search, incentives, and worker–firm sorting is helpful. Labor II and the Empirical Methods book provide useful background, but this course develops its own organizational perspective.

What students will learn¶

Students will learn to turn an organizational decision into a labor research question; separate selection, incentives, assignment, information, and coordination; choose interpretable personnel outcomes and credible comparisons; assess worker as well as firm incidence; and explain why evidence from a particular organization informs a broader mechanism.

Format and research orientation¶

The course combines lectures, paper discussions, and bounded research labs. Readings are divided into required anchors and additional pathways. Labs use Reproduce → Diagnose → Transfer: reproduce a concrete paper-based object, diagnose what it establishes, and transfer the logic to another organizational decision. Access restrictions are stated explicitly; classroom exercises do not require a private corporate data agreement.

Course Map¶

Relationship to the teaching portfolio¶

Labor II supplies the broad firm-side labor foundation. The special topics on behavioral labor, institutions, gender, technology, and labor design study overlapping mechanisms from different perspectives. Here the organizing object is the continuing employment relationship and the system of decisions inside firms. The same paper may return with a different question, but full lectures are not duplicated.

Available materials¶

All ten weeks include a chapter, compiled slides, and a research lab. The handout links below download instructions; the complete scripts, teaching data, and environment notes are in the teaching repository. To run the labs, download the teaching repository or clone it and retain the folder structure. Weeks 1–3 also use shared/figure_style.py; each lab README states its dependencies and smoke command.

Week 1 is available as a chapter, a slide deck (PDF), and a research lab handout with code and data (repository ZIP). The lab pairs published-statistic reconstruction with a synthetic measurement diagnostic and documents a separate bounded official-release re-estimation.

Week 2 is available as a chapter, a slide deck (PDF), and a research lab handout with code and data (repository ZIP). The lab reconstructs interview-sequence design issues with explicitly synthetic data and diagnoses risk sets, lag boundaries, and missing performance for rejected applicants. It does not reproduce the article’s proprietary microdata estimates.

Week 3 is available as a chapter, a slide deck (PDF), and a research lab handout with code and data (repository ZIP). The synthetic lab separates changes in production, recording, and information, with center-level randomization inference and a measurement-validation proposal. It does not reproduce the original study’s data or estimates.

Week 4 is available as a chapter, a slide deck (PDF), and a research lab handout with code and data (repository ZIP). The offline lab replays invented bonus rules, estimates pair-level assignment effects, and diagnoses payout selection, multitasking, composition, and relational payment conditions. Its synthetic data and analytical examples do not reproduce published estimates.

Week 5 is available as a chapter, a slide deck (PDF), and a research lab handout with code and data (repository ZIP). Its offline synthetic lab distinguishes manager assignment from skill, matching, and authority, using paired randomization and diagnostics for mean reversion, connectedness, score noise, delegation, attention, and composition. These invented data and calculations do not reproduce the papers’ empirical estimates.

Week 6 is available as a chapter, a slide deck (PDF), and a research lab handout with code and data (repository ZIP). Its offline synthetic lab separates randomized training offers and common skill assessments from applications, competitive promotion slots, and exits. Students audit career denominators, competing risks, training finance, and current versus next-role assignment. The invented lottery and histories do not reproduce published empirical estimates.

Week 7 is available as a chapter, a slide deck (PDF), and a research lab handout with code and data (repository ZIP). Its offline synthetic lab studies task-aid assignment and peer exposure in four fixed teams. Students reconstruct supported effects, distinguish global sharp-null inference from instructor truth, and audit communication benefits alongside sender costs. The invented experiment does not reproduce published empirical estimates.

Week 8 is available as a chapter, a slide deck (PDF), and a research lab handout with code and data (repository ZIP). Its offline synthetic access experiment distinguishes assignment effects, selected use, retention, and worker conditions. Students diagnose wage and quit measures, separate transfers from resource gains, and build an incidence ledger covering the firm, initial workers, entrants, and leaver destinations. The invented experiment does not reproduce published empirical estimates.

Week 9 is available as a chapter, a slide deck (PDF), and a research lab handout with code and data (repository ZIP). Its offline synthetic factorial lab distinguishes standalone components, conditional effects, factorial marginal effects, the bundle, and complementarity over four follow-up periods. Students evaluate transition costs, maintenance, verified outcomes and worker conditions, then propose a reform evaluation with spillover and attrition plans. The invented design does not reproduce published empirical estimates.

Week 10 is available as a chapter, a slide deck (PDF), and a research lab handout with code and data (repository ZIP). The capstone connects within-organization identification to measurement, portability, data access, and a feasible student research design. Its offline synthetic lab separates source effects, target-standardized source estimates, transport assumptions, and missing-outcome ranges. The final deliverable is a four-page research memo with appendices, reviewed using a constructive rubric. The invented experiment does not reproduce published empirical estimates. All ten weeks have complete chapter, slide, and lab packages.