Abstract The canonical matching model is the workhorse of labour market but lacks a proper amplification mechanism for productivity shocks. One way to amplify effects shocks allow workers endogenously adjust their job search effort: as effort procyclical in model, volatilities increase. Yet, empirical literature points against effort, raising doubts how acyclical (or countercyclical) can coinci...

BACKGROUND Annual US health-related productivity losses are estimated to reach some $260 billion, attributable not only to absenteeism but also to presenteeism (being present at work but working at a reduced capacity). The search for remedies has been hampered by the lack of accurate estimates of the loss of productivity and its true costs. To date, little effort has been made to assess the ava...

Research in virtual teams and distributed work argues that the lack of collocation places an overhead on the performance potential of large, globally distributed teams. In this paper, we revisit this tenet through a case study of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) development to demonstrate how globally dispersed FLOSS communities manage to overcome the problem of geographic separation of ...

Individuals vary greatly in their willingness to select and persist in effortful tasks, even when high-effort will knowingly result in high-reward. Individuals who select and successively complete effortful, goal-directed tasks can be described as industrious. Trying to increase one's industriousness is desirable from a productivity standpoint, yet intrinsically challenging given that effort ex...

This paper presents a set of effort and schedule estimating relationships for predicting software development projects using empirical data from 317 very recent US DoD programs. The first set predicts effort as a function of product size and application type. The second predicts the duration of software development as a function of product size and staffing levels. The estimating relationships ...

ÐThe Personal Software Process is a process improvement methodology aimed at individual software engineers. It claims to improve software quality (in particular defect content), effort estimation capability, and process adaptation and improvement capabilities. We have tested some of these claims in an experiment comparing the performance of participants who had just previously received a PSP co...

To understand how IT affects worker productivity we need to understand the factors that shape information worker productivity in the first place. Typical characteristics of information work (in particular, highly intangible output and significant measurement problems) and the managerial response to them are likely to play significant roles in determining information worker productivity. We exam...

In recent decades, many firms offered more discretion to their employees, often increasing the productivity of effort but also leaving more opportunities for shirking. We show experimentally that complementarities between high effort discretion, rent-sharing, screening opportunities, and competition are important driving forces behind these “high-performance work systems.” We document the endog...

Machine translation technology is not perfect. To be successfully embedded in real-world applications, it must compensate for its imperfections by interacting intelligently with the user within a computer-assisted translation framework. The interactive-predictive paradigm, where both a statistical translation model and a human expert collaborate to generate the translation, has been shown to be...