Do Local Managers Give Labor an Edge?

Do Managers Withhold Good News from Labor Unions?

With scarce empirical support, prior literature argues that managers tend to withhold good news and promote bad news to preserve their bargaining power against labor unions. This paper provides evidence on this rarely supported argument. Using comprehensive firm-level data in Korea where labor unions have a long tradition of making credible threats, we find that overall disclosure frequency is ...

What Do Russian Managers Really Do? an Observational Study with Comparisons to U.s. Managers

Recent events have generated considerable interest, but little empirical evidence, in Russian management. This observation study of a sample of managers (N=66) in a large textile factory in Russia used the same definitions, methodology and procedures as a stream of research conducted by Luthans and his colleagues on U.S. "Real Managers" (see Luthans, Hodgetts and Rosenkrantz [1988]). Similar to...

Do Not Give Up

Unions and the Labor Market for Managers

We examine the relationship between the employment and compensation of managers and CEOs and the presence of a unionized workforce. We develop a simple effciency wage model, with a tradeoff between higher wages for workers and more monitoring, which requires more managers. The model also assumes rent sharing between workers, managers and the owners of the firm. Unions, by redistributing rents t...

Managers, Mentoring, and Internal Labor Markets

We propose a theory of production and allocation of human capital in firms that focuses on the role of line managers, who both invest time to mentor junior employees, and acquire information about the juniors’abilities that is valuable for job assignments. We argue that this dual role of managers implies that internal labor markets and incentive contracts for managers must be determined jointly...