Personnel Economics

Personnel economics is the application of economic and mathematical approaches and econometric and statistical methods to traditional questions in human resources management. Many of the issues studied by personnel economists can be found in traditional textbooks written by organizational behaviour scholars and other human resources specialists. Economists have something new to say about these issues, however, primarily because economics provides a rigorous, and in many cases more straightforward, way to think about these human resources questions than do the more sociological and psychological approaches.

This chapter was originally published in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd edition, 2008. Edited by Steven N. Durlauf and Lawrence E. Blume.

Much of this article is excerpted from a larger overview on personnel economics in R. Gibbons and J. Roberts (eds), Handbook of Organizational Economics , Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.

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  1. http://link.springer.com/referencework/10.1057/978-1-349-95121-5 Edward Lazear
  1. Edward Lazear