Understanding of a firm's trade-offs I recruiting, rewarding and developing workers
Understanding trade-offs in job design and allocation of workers to tasks and jobs
Understanding of the economic principles that can be used for these and related HRM decisions and policies
Skills how to use and refine such personnel policies in the practice of a firm

To improve the performance of a firm, managers have to find tools to hire the right people, to sort them into the right job, to motivate them to do their work well, to develop their skills through formal and informal learning and to cooperate efficiently with co-workers. Firms that stimulate one aspect might do so at the cost of others. Managers therefore face many complex trade-offs in their personnel policies.
In this course economic tools to understand these trade-offs will be discussed and illustrated with examples how to apply them in practice.
Many questions are asked about the employment relationship, such as: Why should pay vary across workers within firms – and how "compressed" should pay be within firms? Should firms pay workers for their performance on the job or for their skills or hours of work? How are pay and promotions structured across jobs to induce optimal effort from employees? How to design jobs and performance measures? Why use teams and how are teams used most effectively? How should all these human resource management practices, from incentive pay to teamwork, be combined within firms?

Lazear E.P. and M. Gibbs (2015), Personnel Economics in Practice, 3rd ed, Wiley, New York.
The textbook is supplemented with a few academic journal articles.

This course is in transition for the bachelor Fiscal Economics.
See the Bachelor Education and Examination Regulations for more information.

The following rule applies to bachelor Fiscal Economics students.
TRANSITIONAL REGULATION (EBC2138):
The bachelor Fiscal Economics has been discontinued.

There will be repeat education for year 1 and year 2 courses up to and including academic year 2025-2026 and exam-only up to and including academic year 2026-2027. For year 3 courses there will be repeat education up to and including 2026-2027 and exam-only up to and including academic year 2027-2028.

Whether a course is in transition, cancelled, or replaced may depend on the cohort you are in. Sometimes there are additional criteria. It is therefore very important to carefully read the EER and any addendum so you can apply the rules to your individual situation.


PREREQUISITES:
Knowledge and understanding of introductory microeconomics, like the first-year course EBC1009, Economics and Business and EBC1010, Microeconomics, the latter being based on (parts of)
Perloff J.M. (2011), Microeconomics, Pearson, Addison Wesley, Boston.
An advanced level of English