Team-Specific Human Capital and Team Performance: Evidence from Doctors

This paper studies whether team members’ past collaboration creates team-specific human capital and influences current team performance. Using administrative Medicare claims for two heart procedures, I find that shared work experience between the doctor who performs the procedure (“proceduralist”) and the doctors who provide care to the patient during the hospital stay for the procedure (“physicians”) reduces patient mortality rates. A one standard deviation increase in proceduralist-physician shared work experience leads to a 10–14 percent reduction in patient 30-day mortality. Patient medical resource use also declines with shared work experience, even as survival improves. (JEL I10, J24, M12, M54)

Disconnected Development? The Importance of Specific Human Capital in the Transition From Student Teaching to the Classroom

We use a novel database of student teaching placements in Washington State to investigate teachers’ transitions from student teaching classrooms to first job classrooms and the implications for student achievement. We find first-year teachers are more effective when they teach in the same or an adjacent grade, in the same school type, or in a classroom with student demographics similar to their student teaching classroom. We document that only 27% of first-year teachers are teaching the same grade they student taught, and that first-year teachers tend to begin their careers in higher poverty classrooms than their student teaching placements. This suggests that better aligning student teacher placements with first-year teacher hiring could be a policy lever for improving early-career teacher effectiveness.

Should I stay or should I go? Skilled immigrants' perceived brain-waste and social embeddedness

PurposeDrawing on embeddedness theory, we examine how skilled immigrants' perceived brain-waste affects their social embeddedness. Social embeddedness facilitates the acquisition of host country-specific human capital, which, in return, can accelerate the transfer of immigrants' human capital in the workplace.Design/methodology/approachIn total, 397 skilled immigrants in Australia participated in this study. We applied a set-theoretic approach to decode the complexity and interplay among the key concepts used in this study.FindingsWe found the impacts of psychological workplace wellbeing and workplace discrimination on social embeddedness differ between skilled immigrants who experience perceived brain-waste and skilled immigrants whose skills were recognized by employers. The results suggest that job satisfaction is the most critical factor contributing to social embeddedness among skilled immigrants who did not report brain-waste. Furthermore, we found that married skilled male immigrants who reported brain-waste still could embed socially if they did not directly experience workplace discrimination.Originality/valueThe majority of previous studies have compared skilled immigrants with their local-born colleagues, but we compared two groups of skilled migrants in the current study. We adopted fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to test how unique configurations of several variables can ease their social embeddedness into the host society.

Change in occupational tasks and its implications: evidence from a task panel from 1973 to 2011 for Western Germany

The change of tasks in occupations is of interest to economic and sociological research from three perspectives. The task-based technological change approach describes tasks as the link between capital input and labor demand. In human capital theory, tasks are used to distinguish between general and specific human capital. Moreover, in institutional economics or sociology, it is argued that the specificity of occupations influences the marketability of the corresponding skills and tasks. However, data sources that illustrate task change within occupations are rare. The objective of this paper is therefore to introduce a task panel, which is created based on 16 cross-sectional surveys from between 1973 and 2011 of the German microcensus (Labor-Force-Survey), as an additional source to monitor task change. I present and discuss the harmonization method for eleven main activities that are exercised by the incumbents of the occupation within 176 occupational groups. To demonstrate the research potential of this novel data source, I develop an alternative theoretical view on the task-technology framework and classify the harmonized tasks according to their relationship to technological inventions in the third industrial (micro-electronic) revolution (technologically replaceable, technology-accompanying, technology-complementary and technologically neutral). Matching the task panel to an already existing Occupational Panel (OccPan) for Western Germany from 1976 to 2010, I can use fixed-effect regressions to show that changes of tasks within occupations correspond with theoretical expectations regarding the median wage growth of an occupation. The task panel can be matched to any data set containing a German classification of occupations from 1975, 1988 or 1992 to investigate further effects of task change on individual labor market success.

Valuable Experience: How University Internships Affect Graduates’ Income

This paper analyzes whether and how attending an internship during tertiary education affects income. We address endogeneity with an IV approach that exploits information regarding whether the internship was a mandatory component of the study. We further address selection into programs with mandatory internship by using the share of mandatory internships at the closest university, exploiting the low mobility of Swiss students. The results show that internships increase graduates’ incomes. We explore potential mechanisms for the effect of internships on income, finding that general human capital is the main mechanism rather than firm- or field-specific human capital, signaling, or screening. These results indicate that students should continue to invest in internships and that mandatory internships have a place in university curricula because they improve the quality of education.

Mapping the (mis)match of university degrees in the graduate labor market

This paper contributes to the scarce literature on the topic of horizontal education-job mismatch in the labor market for graduates of universities. Field-of-study mismatch or horizontal mismatch occurs when university graduates, trained in a particular field, work in another field at their formal qualification level. The data used in the analysis come from the first nationally representative survey of labor insertion of recent university graduates in Spain. By estimating a multinomial logistic regression, we are able to identify the match status 4 years after graduation based on self-assessments. We find a higher likelihood of horizontal mismatch among graduates of Chemistry, Mathematics, Physics, Pharmacy, and Languages and Literature. Only graduates in Medicine increase the probability of being adequately matched in their jobs. It may be hypothesized that horizontal mismatch is more likely among those graduates in degree fields that provide more general skills and less likely among those from degree fields providing more occupation-specific skills. Other degrees such as Business Studies, and Management and Economics Studies increase the probability of being vertically mismatched (over-educated). Vertical mismatch preserves at least some of the specific human capital gained through formal educational qualifications. However, some workers with degrees in Labor Relations and Social Work are in non-graduate positions and study areas unrelated to their studies. The paper also shows that graduates in the fields of health sciences and engineering/architecture increase the probability of achieving an education-job match after external job mobility.

Returns to migration after job loss—The importance of job match

Loss of specific human capital is often identified as a mechanism through which displaced workers might experience permanent drops in earnings after job loss. Research has shown that displaced workers who migrate out of their region of origin have lower earnings than those who do not. This paper extends the discussion on returns to migration by accounting for the type of jobs people get and how related they are to their skills. Using an endogenous treatment model to control for selection bias in migration and career change, we compare displaced stayers with displaced movers in Sweden. Results show that migrants who get a job that matches their occupation- and industry-specific skills display the highest earnings among all displaced workers. If migration is combined with a job mismatch, earning losses are instead observed. This group experiences the lowest earnings among all displaced workers.