Barcelona Labor Economics Summer School 

 

Personnel Economics

Instructors: Ghazala Azmat (UPF (on leave), Queen Mary and Barcelona GSE) and Maia Güell (University of Edinburgh)

The objective of this course is to study firms’ decisions regarding their internal organization; focusing on issues such as hiring, training, promotion, and incentive policies. Ultimately, the goal is to understand the relationship between these personnel policies and firms’ performance, as well as the functioning of the labor market. The course will analyze the theoretical fundamentals of the problems faced by organizations and provides empirical evidence to evaluate the theories.

 

The course offers a framework for analyzing several human resources topics from an economic perspective. Traditionally, these topics were studied from other points of view, primarily from psychological and sociological perspectives. In the last decades, economists have made substantial contributions to the understanding of these topics.

 

This is an applied course that should be of interest to graduate students or academics who want to expand their knowledge in the area and to practitioners interested in understanding the fundamentals that determine the relationship between firms’ internal organization and its productivity.

Course Outline

1. Introduction
2. Hiring decisions
3. On-the-job training
4. Rewarding performance
5. Teamwork incentives
6. Firing decisions
   
7. Personnel and Management practices

Ghazala Azmat is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Pompeu Fabra (on leave) and a Lecturer at Queen Mary University. Ghazala is also a Research Associate at the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) at the London School of Economics, an Affiliated Professor at the Barcelona GSE, and a Research Fellow at CESIFO (University of Munich). Her main research interests are in applied and empirical microeconomics. Her research focuses on issues relating to competition, incentives and organizational structure, as well as on topics in labor and public economics. She is currently working on a number of projects that analyze the fundamentals behind incentive schemes used by organizations to influence the performance and the participation of agents.

 

Maia Güell is a Professor of Economics at the University of Edinburgh. Maia is also a Research Affiliate in the Labour Economics Programme of CEPR, the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), and the Centre for Economic Performance (LSE). She is an elected executive committee member of the European Association of Labour Economists. Maia received a PhD in Economics at the London School of Economics and was a post-doctoral student at Princeton University. Her research interests are in theoretical and empirical labor economics. Her research interests include the incentives around labour market institutions and the consequences for labor market outcomes; motivation schemes for workers; gender differences in the labor market; and the measurement of intergenerational mobility using surnames.