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Using an extensive data set on Finnish workers during the years 1990–2002, we analyze the relation between dispersion of wages within plants and labor productivity. We find a positive and significant relation between dispersion of wages within plant and average sales per worker. This relation is quadratic when dispersion is conditioned on workers’ observable characteristics. We also find positive and significant relation between unconditional dispersion of wages within plant and value added per hours worked, while we find a non-significant relation between conditional wage dispersion and valued added per hours worked. Results indicate that the incentive effect of wage dispersion dominates fairness or sabotage considerations.

This study examines the performance consequences of pay dispersion in publicly listed firms in Turkey for the period 2009–2013. Our study focuses on vertical pay dispersion, which reflects intra-firm and vertical differences between pay at two important hierarchical levels: top executive level and lower hierarchical level. The author intends to present arguments based on equity theory and tournament theory and will propose two contradictory hypotheses to test them within the context of an emerging market. Results provided in the present study confirm that pay dispersion between executives and employees has a positive impact on a firm’s profitability in Turkey. Our study contributes current empirical evidence by examining vertical pay dispersion in an emerging country context, which may have a different cultural orientation and societal-wide assumptions concerning fairness, power, and disparities, relative to its developed country counterparts.

Organizational researchers have become increasingly interested in multi-level constructs – that is, constructs that are meaningful at multiple levels of analysis. However, despite the plethora of theoretical and empirical work on multi-level topics, explicit frameworks for validation of multi-level constructs have yet to be fully developed. Moreover, available principles for conducting construct validation assume that the construct resides at a single level of analysis. We propose a five-step framework for conceptualizing and testing multi-level constructs by integrating principles of construct validation with recent advancements in multi-level theory, research, and methodology. The utility of the framework is illustrated using theoretical and empirical examples.

This study contains an assessment of air pollution levels in Trafalgar Road, Greenwich. This is a congested road on a main route into central London, which has achieved notoriety since its residents took legal action in an attempt to restrict traffic. The four types of dispersion model used in the assessment are briefly described. All four models show that there is a likelihood that air quality standards for a number of pollutants, particularly PM₁₀, will be exceeded in the vicinity of busy congested roads in London. Zones where standards are exceeded are restricted to regions within 10m or so from the road. Any assessment has to take account of concentrations on a very fine scale (at distances of 10m from a road).

Does staffing contribute to organizational effectiveness and sustained competitive advantage, or are many of staffing’s implications merely cross-level fallacies? This article provides a critical examination of staffing research and practice, and proposes a multilevel model of staffing that ties together micro (e.g. personnel selection), meso (e.g. team staffing), and macro (e.g. organizational strategy, Human Resources practices) theory, research, and practice. The model is both integrative and prescriptive, providing a basic organizing structure for examining staffing research within and across levels. The article begins with a review of multilevel theory, followed by a review and critique of the dominant staffing paradigms from a multilevel perspective. It is shown these single level paradigms cannot answer many of the primary questions of interest to staffing specialists. In contrast, the multilevel staffing model not only addresses these limitations, but also prompts a variety of new predictions that oftentimes run counter to prevailing wisdom. Staffing specialists are challenged to show how our science and practice contribute to better functioning organizations.

To resolve an inherent dilemma in extant research on geographically dispersed research and development (R&D), this study explores interdependencies between formal and informal network structures. Firms that seek to benefit from the decentralization associated with disperse R&D must align it with an informal structure that enhances organizational members’ motivation to share and assimilate their unique knowledge and skills. On the basis of an investigation among 424 US biotechnology firms between 1973 and 2003, this study reveals the moderating effect of the firm’s informal social structure on the effect that geographically dispersed R&D personnel have on the exploration of new technological opportunities. Specifically, the higher the social network density among R&D members, the more likely geographic disparity is to affect exploration; however, this likelihood decreases with an increase in power asymmetries. These results offer insights into the conditions in which the appropriate management of geographically dispersed R&D varies.

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of online price dispersion in Europe, across a broad range of product categories and countries. Using the dominant European price comparison site we collected firm specific prices, weekly, from seven European countries (Denmark, France, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom) for 31 unique products, falling into five distinct product categories (printers, PDAs, scanners, games consoles, computer games and music), over the nine-month period October 2001 to June 2002. The resulting data set comprises over 17,000 individual price observations.

Using a number of alternative measures of price dispersion we find significant differences in the degree of price dispersion observed in online markets, both between countries and across product categories. We consider alternative explanations for online price dispersion and analyze their significance in explaining the observed differences.

We estimate a dynamic programming model of schooling decisions in which the degree of risk aversion can be inferred from schooling decisions. In our model, individuals are heterogeneous with respect to school and market abilities but homogeneous with respect to the degree of risk aversion. We allow endogenous schooling attainments to affect the level of risk experienced in labor market earnings through wage dispersion and employment rate dispersion. We find a low degree of relative risk aversion (0.93) and the estimates indicate that both wage and employment rate dispersions decrease significantly with schooling attainments. We find that a counterfactual increase in risk aversion will increase schooling attainments. Finally, the low degree of risk aversion implies that an increase in earnings dispersion would have little effect on schooling attainments.