IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/ecinqu/v44y2006i2p199-214.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Returns to Skills and Personnel Management: U.S. Department of Defense Scientists and Engineers

Author

Listed:
  • Michael Gibbs

Abstract

Personnel records are used to examine compensation, recruitment, and retention of a group of highly skilled workers: civilian scientists and engineers in U.S. Department of Defense laboratories. In contrast to those of the private sector, returns to skills were largely flat for this group from 1982 to 1996. Despite this, quality and performance of recruits relative to earlier cohorts, and of those retained relative to those who left, remained stable. One explanation is the importance of defense industry--specific human capital. These results hold for three different pay plans, including the federal government's primary plan and two intended to introduce greater flexibility in personnel management. (JEL J31, J44, J45, M52) Copyright 2006, Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Michael Gibbs, 2006. "Returns to Skills and Personnel Management: U.S. Department of Defense Scientists and Engineers," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 44(2), pages 199-214, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:ecinqu:v:44:y:2006:i:2:p:199-214
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/ei/cbj012
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Catherine Haeck & Frank Verboven, 2012. "The Internal Economics of a University: Evidence from Personnel Data," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 30(3), pages 591-626.
    2. Pema, Elda & Mehay, Stephen, 2010. "The role of job assignment and human capital endowments in explaining gender differences in job performance and promotion," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 17(6), pages 998-1009, December.
    3. Daniel Kuehn & Hal Salzman, 2018. "The Engineering Labor Market: An Overview of Recent Trends," NBER Chapters, in: US Engineering in a Global Economy, pages 11-46, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    4. Christian Pfeifer, 2011. "Handicaps in Job Assignment: Insiders, Outsiders and Gender," Journal of Labor Research, Springer, vol. 32(1), pages 1-20, March.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • J31 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials
    • J44 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Particular Labor Markets - - - Professional Labor Markets and Occupations
    • J45 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Particular Labor Markets - - - Public Sector Labor Markets
    • M52 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Personnel Economics - - - Compensation and Compensation Methods and Their Effects

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:ecinqu:v:44:y:2006:i:2:p:199-214. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/weaaaea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.