Teaching with Personnel Economics
Personnel Economics studies the economics of the workplace using simple but formal economic models. Models of employee motivation, compensation and selection are melded with real-world examples and with field studies of actual workplaces. The up-to-date treatment weaves the rapidly growing behavioral economics literature on personnel topics into the entire book.
While this book grew out of an upper-division undergraduate course I teach at UC Santa Barbara, it can also be used as background reading in PhD courses, as a text in masters-level or undergraduate economics and business courses, and in labor economics, behavioral and experimental economics courses.
This introductory website provides an overview of the book's approach and samples of supplementary course materials that are available from Oxford University Press. To examine the complete set of instructional materials, click here.
Accessing the textbook (including free examination copies)
Using the book: Complete Slides for a ten-week short course in Personnel Economics are freely available for download.
Suggestions for alternative paths through the book for different audiences are also available.
Resources in Personnel Economics: Links to Key Articles and to New Research (since the book was written).
Technical demands: For the most part, mathematical demands are limited to maximizing a function of a single variable; this can be visualized graphically or derived with the basic rules of univariate calculus. Budget constraints and indifference curves are also used, but these are developed in the book. Chapter 7 provides a beginner’s introduction to the book's two main empirical tools: experiments and regression analysis.
Teaching materials: The following teaching materials are available to instructors who assign the book:
Complete Lecture Slides for all 27 Chapters
Complete Answers to the book’s 118 Discussion Questions
Downloadable spreadsheets illustrating key theoretical concepts
Skill-building materials:
Excel-based Problem Sets (with solutions) These exercises ask the student to solve a simple but realistic choice problem (such as an optimal piece rate contract, a hiring strategy, or an optimal tournament contract), then take advantage of Excel’s ability to instantly perform numerical comparative statics. Students are then asked to explain the intuition behind those comparative statics. While the Excel problem sets (and corresponding exams) are optional features of a course based on the text, I find that they build a lot of intuition. My students review them quite favorably, both for their instructional benefit and because students appreciate building their Excel skills for career reasons.
Short-Answer Question Bank (with solutions) These include true/false/explain questions, questions that require drawing or interpreting a diagram, problems requiring simple arithmetic, and questions that probe a student’s understanding by linking or comparing concepts. They can be used for assignments, quizzes, practice questions and exams.
Testing materials: When I teach the course, I use two forms of evaluation:
Short-Answer questions from the bank.
Excel-based exams. Students prepare for these using the Excel Problem Sets. I administer these exams in university computer labs, but other proctoring options are also available.