Personnel Economics Workshop (PEW)

Notice

PEW in 2026 will be held on the fourth Saturday of each month. The workshop starts at 3:00 p.m.
Each workshop basically consists of two sessions: a 1-hour presentation and a 1.5-hour presentation.

Aug 8 (Sst.) 2026

Venue: Waseda University; classroom 3-702
Speaker: Kensuke Sawada (Waseda University)
Title: Ranking Japanese Firms Using Revealed Preference
Abstract:
We construct the first revealed-preference ranking of Japanese firms, recovering each firm’s value, following Sorkin (2018), as the dominant eigenvector of the employerto-employer mobility network in LinkedIn career histories (18,364 firms). Estimated value rises with pay (rank correlation 0.52) but is uncorrelated with firm size. Linked to OpenWork employee reviews, the ranking reflects non-pay amenities over and above pay. Separating the rating subscales into non-wage relational and growth amenities versus monetary and stability amenities, value tracks the former (0.29) but is orthogonal to the latter (0.06). The strongest correlate of value is firm age. The most desirable firms are young (median age nine versus forty-six), and the firms that score highest on long-term development of employees, the hallmark of the traditional Japanese model of lifetime employment, are the ones workers leave, even conditional on age, pay, and size.
Language: English
Time: 15:00 ~ 16:00

Speaker: Akseli Palomäki (Columbia University)
Title: Imperfect Information and Strategy in High School Choice
Abstract:
Families are widely found to place little weight on school effectiveness, and a growing literature asks whether that reflects preferences, missing information, or the strategic problem of submitting a short ranked list to a matching mechanism. We study a setting that separates these: a national quality ranking of high schools, reaching all families at once and allowing the market to adjust. Finnish administrative registers give us complete rank-ordered application lists, prior and later achievement, family background, and residence, so we can follow both the demand response and what happened to admissions. We estimate how a school's published standing shifts the probability that a student ranks it in their application, holding student and school characteristics fixed. Preliminary results suggest that demand moved away from — rather than toward — the schools the ranking praised, concentrated among students near the admission margin and in markets offering realistic alternatives, and that admission to those schools became no harder. This points to information about quality operating through beliefs about admission risk, and we plan to formalize the channel in a structural model of choice under a noisy quality signal.
Language: English
Time: 16:15 ~ 17:45

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In-person venues or/and Zoom meeting URL will be announced via the mailing list.

Oct 24(Sat.) 2026

Jan 23 (Sat.) 2026

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