Derek Jones, the Irma M. and Robert D. Morris Professor of Economics, recently presented a paper at the International Conference on Democracy and Participation in the 21st Century. The conference took place on July 12th to 15th at the Lisbon School of Management.
Co-authored with Patrick Sen ’15 and Copenhagen Business School’s Niels Mygind, “Human Resource Management and Firm performance in emerging market economies: Evidence of Individual and Complementary Effects?” was an outgrowth of work undertaken by Sen for his senior thesis. Sen is currently an analyst with Goldman Sachs.
Using representative data for Estonian firms, the authors investigated whether productivity is greater in an emerging market economy when firms use employee involvement (EI) in decision-making and financial participation (FP).
Their findings provided only weak evidence in support of synergies between EI and FP. They found that, in general, individual forms of EI had little impact on productivity. But the study did show that some forms of FP, such as employee ownership and profit sharing, enhanced business performance.
