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

PLEASE NOTE THAT THE INFORMATION ABOUT THE TEACHING AND ASSESSMENT METHOD(S) USED IN THIS COURSE IS WITH RESERVATION. A RE-EMERGENCE OF THE CORONAVIRUS AND NEW COUNTERMEASURES BY THE DUTCH GOVERNMENT MIGHT FORCE COORDINATORS TO CHANGE THE TEACHING AND ASSESSMENT METHODS USED. THE MOST UP-TO-DATE INFORMATION ABOUT THE TEACHING/ASSESSMENT METHOD(S) WILL BE AVAILABLE IN THE COURSE SYLLABUS.

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.

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