Average Seniority Research Articles

The Roles of Employer and Employee Characteristics for Plant Productivity

The relationships of worker characteristics and productivity are examined using a matched worker-plant data set from Finnish manufacturing. The panel data are used for estimating productivity and wage profiles according to average age, seniority, and education. We measure productivity using the multilateral total factor productivity index. We find that the wage returns to plant-specific seniority exceed productivity returns when seniority is high. This result supports the hypothesis that human capital is not firm specific, and seniority related wages are used for incentive reasons, but may also be a symptom of sorting or insider influences on wage formation. Plant average age improves productivity more than it increases wage when average age is low, but for higher ages the productivity and wage returns to age are fairly similar. The returns to education in terms of wage and productivity are fairly close to each other for higher levels of education, but mid-level education is underpaid.

The Gender Gap in Top Corporate Jobs

Using the ExecuComp data set, which contains information on the five highest-paid executives in each of a large number of U.S. firms for the years 1992–97, the authors examine the gender compensation gap among high-level executives. Women, who represented about 2.5% of the sample, earned about 45% less than men. As much as 75% of this gap can be explained by the fact that women managed smaller companies and were less likely to be CEO, Chair, or company President. The unexplained gap falls to less than 5% with an allowance for the younger average age and lower average seniority of the female executives. These results do not rule out the possibility of discrimination via gender segregation or unequal promotion. Between 1992 and 1997, however, women nearly tripled their participation in the top executive ranks and also strongly improved their relative compensation, mostly by gaining representation in larger corporations.

Predicting the institutional effects of term limits

In this paper we develop a model to predict the seniority turnover, and transition consequences of term limit reforms for any institution with a regularized procedure for rotating membership. With this model we can predict the number of members who will be serving in their last term at any given time once an institution reaches a stable state under term limit reforms. For example, our results show that for the U.S. Senate current term limit proposals will result in a substantial increase in the number of “lame duck” members and a significant reduction in average seniority. We make no claims as to the public policy effects of term limit proposals. However, our model can be used to design a proposal that will maximize any benefits or minimize any public policy effects found to be associated with term limit reforms.

Factors Influencing Organizational Performance in Gainsharing Programs

Using survey data from managers at 269 establishments in the United States and Canada, this article examines factors influencing outcomes of gainsharing. The ordered probit analyses generally indicated that these outcomes have significant associations with employee involvement, bonus payouts, employee bonus share, bonus group size, consultant involvement, the administration of employee votes, labor intensity, market situation, establishment's financial condition, the average seniority level of employees, union status, and union support.

Patterns of political action committee contributions to the 1980 campaigns for the United States House of Representatives

Our most robust findings can be summarized as follows: u The spatial location of candidates is important in determining the pattern of campaign contributions. Many PACs and all PAC types, except agricultural cooperatives, contribute in a manner highly consistent with a simple spatial model. There is little giving by an individual PAC to candidates at opposite ends of the dimension. There is no instance of a PAC contributing to incumbents located at each end of the dimension and only to challengers of incumbents in the middle (or vice versa). Contributions against incumbents (i.e., to challengers of incumbents) are often spatial mirror images of a PAC's giving in favor of incumbents, though this statement must be tempered by the fact that the large majority of PACs give relatively little money to challengers. Few PACs give money to both challenger and incumbent in the same race. Giving in open-seat races is, if anything, even more spatially consistent than in races where an incumbent is running. While many individual PACs exhibit patterns of contributions consistent with the "ideological" dimension, the data for 1980 suggest that there was no particular bias toward one end of the spectrum or the other. Taking all PACs together essentially eliminates the effect of the location variable in the regressions. Giving in races with an incumbent on the ballot was, overall, balanced across the dimension. There are, however, “ideological” distinctions even among groups as broadly defined as the FEC categories. For the Corporate, Labor, and Trade/Membership/Health groups, the incumbent's location on the “ideological” dimension is an important explanatory variable even when other factors specific to the incumbent are considered. (Of course, “ideology” matters to Nonconnected groups, too. They just tend to balance each other off in positive money, though not in negative.) On average, Corporate and Trade groups favor conservative incumbents and opponents of liberal incumbents. Labor PACs do the opposite. Except for Labor PACs, party is not an important variable in explaining positive contributions, once the incumbent's voting record is taken into account. For contributions to challengers, however, party is significant. Corporate, Nonconnected, and Trade PACs gave to opponents of Democrats. Labor PACs did the opposite. The expected closeness of the election is always an important variable. Both positive money and contributions to challengers increase as the probability of a strong challenge increases. This suggests that PACs are sensitive to the potential impact of contributions on electoral outcomes. Although committee assignments have some importance in explaining campaign contributions by PAC categories, their net effect is never strong, except in the case of Cooperatives. This is almost certainly because of the diversity of interests represented by PACs in every category except Coops, which are essentially one giant PAC of milk producers. We would surmise that competitive forces in the House result in most members having a portfolio of committee assignments that provides maximum advantage vis-a-vis each member's constituency. It would therefore be surprising if, overall, committee assignments by themselves pointed to significant differences in generating campaign resources. Being chairman or ranking minority member of a committee has no impact on campaign contributions, other things equal. Seniority, as measured by number of consecutive years in office, has a complicated role. For positive contributions, seniority has a nonmonotonic effect, with contributions being higher for the most junior and most senior members, ceteris paribus, than for incumbents with average seniority. Negative contributions, however, are not significantly related to seniority.

The vocational side of a new start in life: A career model of immigrants

The research tests a career model of immigrants with the following stages: crystallization, vocational retraining, job entry and trial, establishment, and maintenance. Two samples of immigrants, one consisting of 89 newcomers and another consisting of 60 white-collar workers with an average seniority of 5 years in the country, are followed up during a period of 2 years, after initially taking a test battery measuring vocationally relevant traits. Dependent criterion variables are occupational government examinations and adjustment to the job. Smallest space analysis is used to construct the career space of the newcomer cohort, and multiple regression of criterion variables on success predictors was performed. Both methods confirmed the model. The need arose to reconsider the duration of career stages of immigrants and their link to certain ages in comparison to the models in use. The research brought into focus the continuity of the process of career reconstruction after the interruption of vocational activity caused by emigration.

Spectral distributions of mixed configurations of identical nucleons in the seniority scheme II. Configuration-seniority scheme

Configuration-seniority spectral distributions as well as fixed seniority and fixed total seniority and parity distributions are studied in detail for mixed configurations of identitical nucleons. The decomposition of any (1+2) -body Hamiltonian into irreducible tensors with respect to the unitary and symplectic groups in each subshell is obtained. Group theoretical methods based on the Wigner-Eckart theorem for the higher unitary groups are used to get analytical expressions for the partial widths of configuration-seniority distributions. During this derivation, various isoscalar factors for the chain SU (2..cap omega..) is contained inSp (2..cap omega..) are determined. Numerical calculations of centroid energies, partial widths, and mixing parameters are performed in the Sn and Pb nuclei with a surface delta and a gaussian interactions. Average ordinary and total seniority breaking is studied. Total seniority space truncations in the ground state region are discussed in the Pb nuclei in connections with various approximation schemes.