Personalforschung an Hochschulen - Rainer Hampp Verlag

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448 Personalforschung an Hochschulen 2. A Brief Review of the Theories The most recognized explanation of the wage-tenure profile is the theory of human capital. Generally, the theory suggests that the accumulation of skills and knowledge leads to an increase in productivity which, in turn leads to an increase in wages over the lifetime of a worker. The rising productivity is either due to firm-specific or general human capital aggregation. If on the one hand the investment in human capital is general it is productive in raising productivity at every firm by the same amount. Thus, the wage mimics productivity. If on the other hand the investment was made in specific human capital, the worker’s output will only increase in the present firm because it is useless in any other. As such, a worker’s wage profile is initially higher and after a certain (training) period lower than his productivity. Alternatively, the theory of incentive wage, which suggests that backloading payment is used as a worker discipline device. Workers are undercompensated early in their career but are motivated to work hard in order to stay with the firm and reap their due compensation that comes with longer tenure. This results because holding out payment until late in the individual’s lifetime alters the worker’s incentives to reduce his effort on the job. According to theory, incentive wages are most likely to be found where monitoring costs are high. As implicated above, human capital and incentive wage theories agree on the fact that earnings rise with additional tenure, but they differ in whether productivity rises faster or slower than does the wage, assuming performance rises at all. The matching story proposes that due to information asymmetries recently hired workers earn less than observationally similar employees whose performance is known to the employer. As the employer learns a worker’s „real“ productivity, he either lays him off or pays him a wage that reflects his true productivity. As the percentage of workers whose productivity is unknown to the employer decends over time, wages rise with tenure. Whether the effect of tenure on wages is substantial was questioned by several economists due to the problem of unobserved heterogeneity across individuals and across job matches in panel settings. Briefly, they stress that this problem causes upward biased estimates of the tenure coefficient in a traditional OLS specification, because of the likely correlation between tenure and unobserved individual and job match specific effects. In order to remedy this distortion it is necessary to purge the estimation via a procedure that employs a specific instrumental variable for tenure that is correlated with it, but has actually nothing to do with the error term. As a result, the estimation will produce consistent returns to tenure. Testing these competing theories empirically is difficult, because most often real productivity measures are simply not available. The analysis accounts for this setback. 3. Data, Models and Empirical Findings A unique database from a single professional sports industry, the National Basketball Association (NBA) is used to test the superiority of one model over others in explaining basketball players upward sloping age-earnings profiles. The data set is
Zeitschrift für Personalforschung, 17. Jg., Heft 4, 2003 449 drawn from two primary sources, the Sporting News Official NBA Register and the Sporting News Official NBA Guide. It consists of all players that appeared in at least one regular season game in any of the ten consecutive NBA-seasons 1990/91- 1999/2000. The total number of observations is about 4.500, with some players being active in all ten seasons and others in only one of them. While player performance figures (games played, minutes, field goals, free throws, three points, rebounds, assists, blocks, turnovers, steals etc.) and individual characteristics (age, career duration, years with current team, draft number, participation in all star games and a player’s height) are available for all athletes, this is not the case for player salaries. This information is missing for approximately 3% of the population. As indicated, empirical support for one or the other theory is rather comme ci comme ça, because these investigations rely on proxies for worker productivity that are more or less accurate. Since the professional sports scene provides the relevant data, a reliable test of the various theories seems feasible. In an attempt to set a specification that tests the different theories, a traditional Mincer-type wage equation is used that tries to identify the determinants of player salaries via OLS regression analysis. More precisely in this equation, players’ log earnings is used as dependent variable, wheras the regressors such as human capital variables (experience and tenure), performance parameters and other controls try to explain the variance in players’ salaries. According to human capital, player wages are determined solely on the basis of productivity improvements through the acquisition of general and/or specific training. If this would be the case we would observe all coefficients in the wage equation except of the performance coefficients to be zero: Productivity equals earnings. Controversely, the shirkling-threat model, which forecasts a positive correlation between tenure and wage, independent of performance. Or more simply: The magnitude of the tenure effect in the wage equation should be materially reduced after plugging in performance statistics. However, if this is not being the case there exists an „isolated“ tenure effect which cannot be justified via productivity improvements. Bringing in matching theory complicates the analysis, due to the problem of individual and job match specific effects. Thus, a valid instrument for tenure is used that purges the e- quation from estimation errors. If job match specific effects do indeed play a substantial role in determining a player’s wage, wage growth is rather a function of match quality than a function of performance improvements as postulated by human capital through the accumulation of tenure. My prefered 2SLS overall model suggests that shirking and job matching theories in concert provide the best explanation for the upwards sloping age-earnings profiles of NBA players. Returns to tenure are found to be significant but it’s magnitude is reduced by 43%, when the spurious bias – stemming from OLS – is controlled for. The fact that tenure remains considerably large – unaffected of productivity – but is simultaneously substantially reduced due to job match specific effects, is in harmony with incentive and matching arguments.
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