Firm‐Specific Human Capital: A Skill‐Weights Approach

By Edward P. Lazear. Journal of Political Economy, 2009

748 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The theory of human capital is agnostic on what constitutes firm‐specific skills. The theory specifies that specific skills contribute to productivity only at the current firm. A broader approach lets all skills be general, but firms use them with different weights attached. For example, computer programming, economics, and accounting are general skills, but there may be only one firm that wants workers trained in all three. One implication is that wage profiles and the split of human capital costs depend on thickness of the market. Another is that firms pay for what appears to be general training.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e5e9f532df3d6a203b21498fa586d4d8b82b0284

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Citations in the corpus

The future of employee development (2019, neutral): “While the skills are general, their bundled nature makes them more valuable within the current employer then they would be elsewhere (Lazear, 2009).”
Micro-Foundations of Firm-Specific Human Capital: When Do Employees Perceive Their Skills to be Firm-Specific? (2016, neutral): “In addition, a person’s portfolio of skills may include a mixture of such varied skills (Lazear, 2009).”
Multidimensional Skills, Sorting, and Human Capital Accumulation (2020, positive): “The broad approach is the same as in the present paper: each occupation is characterized by the vector of weights (the degree of task complexity) it places on a limited number of different skill dimensions, as in Lazear’s (2009) skill-weights approach.”
Labor Unemployment Risk and Corporate Financing Decisions (2013, neutral): “Using changes in state unemployment insurance benefit laws as a source of variation in the costs borne by workers during layoff spells, we explore the connection between unemployment risk and the corporate financing decisions of public firms in the United States.”
Resources for What? Understanding Performance in the Resource-Based View and Strategic Human Capital Resource Literatures (2021, background): “…to knowledge of physical layouts (e.g., in which aisle a product is located), people (the personalities and working styles of coworkers and customers), proprietary technology (Home Depot’s product tracking system), or culture (how things get done here) (Barney, 1986a; Lazear, 2009; Ployhart, 2015).”
Political promotion and labor investment efficiency (2018, background): “Considering that human capital is the most important factor that determines firm productivity (Erosa, Koreshkova, & Restuccia, 2010; Lazear, 2009; Moretti, 2004), investment efficiency of human capital is essential for a firm sustaining competitive advantage and high productivity level.”
The Resource-Based View of the Firm, Human Resources, and Human Capital: Progress and Prospects (2021, background): “(In such an example, firm-specificity is generated by combining/weighting general skills in a unique way, Lazear, 2009) That is promising.”
The Structure of the Product Space and the Evolution of Comparative Advantage (2007, positive): “The micro-foundations for such a model are in the spirit of Lazear (2003), who models firm-specific human capital as a weighted combination of skills specific to a firm, but which are an imperfect substitute for the combination of skills required in another firm.”
Tenure, Experience, Human Capital, and Wages: A Tractable Equilibrium Search Model of Wage Dynamics (2014, neutral): “The first one relates to Mincer’s (1974) original specification of log-earnings as a function of individual schooling and experience. In their review of Mincer’s stylized facts about post-schooling wage growth in the U.S., Rubinstein and Weiss (2006) list human capital accumulation and job search as”
Generalists versus specialists: Lifetime work experience and chief executive officer pay (2013, positive): “A broader approach assumes all skills are general but firms use them with different weights (Lazear, 2009). ersus specialists: Lifetime work experience and chief ttp://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jfineco.2013.01.001i labor market.”