Summer term 2024

Prof. Dr. Nick Zubanov

Kickoff: Monday, 08.04.24, 11:45 - 13:15  (online) Zoomlink

Presentation-Meetings: Friday, 07.06.24 + Saturday, 08.06.24, 10:00 - 18:00 in room tba

Description:
Insights from large amounts of data that firms accumulate can provide valuable clues for improving management practices and, as a result, economic performance. Modern economy needs people capable of doing data analysis and interpreting its results in ways that can inform important management decisions. This seminar aims to introduce its participants to the basics of data analysis with applications in business management, focussing on HR management. This focus owes itself to Prof. Zubanov’s research interests.

The seminar is offered to senior bachelor students who should have successfully passed courses in micro- and/or organisational economics and econometrics. Therefore, it is expected that students have background knowledge of economic theory and econometrics and are able to show this knowledge in their seminar work. To refresh their knowledge, students are welcome to consult Prof. Zubanov’s lectures in Introduction to Organisational Economics (https://tinyurl.com/5xcjj29v), Personnel Economics 1 (https://tinyurl.com/5f59sa6b) and 2 (https://tinyurl.com/nv55p2cz), and Econometrics (https://tinyurl.com/7zcvy3t6). Additionally, students are expected to be able to work in Stata or R, whichever package they prefer, or are willing to learn to do so quickly. Excel is not sufficient!

While sound method is essential for data analysis, econometrics itself is not the main focus of the seminar. Instead, emphasis will be made on how to build a case for business policy based on what the data say. This requires not only technical expertise but also the ability to correctly interpret and clearly communicate analytical results. Students will be asked to “imagine being consultants working on a project in a firm”.

At the end of the seminar, participants are expected to produce a data analysis project and present it (40% of the final grade), and write up the results in a seminar paper of maximum 1500 words (60% of the final grade). Generally, students end up writing their bachelor thesis with the professor whose bachelor seminar they attended. The requirements for seminar papers and theses can be found here: https://www.wiwi.uni-konstanz.de/zubanov/teaching/bachelor-masterthesis/.

Procedure:
The seminar will begin with a kickoff meeting where a short presentation will be made by Prof. Zubanov. Then, the participants will be randomly assigned into “project teams”. Each project team will be randomly assigned a topic from the list specified below. The project teams will meet the professor individually to share the data attached to their topic and confirm the plan of their data analysis project. Once the data has been shared and the plan confirmed, each project team can (if they want) have one meeting of up to 1 hour with the seminar professor, to show preliminary results and receive feedback. The results of each project team shall be presented on an agreed date. Each project presentation should last up to 30 minutes plus 15 minutes for questions and answers, and carries 40% of the final grade. The remaining 60% of the final grade is the seminar paper of max. 1500 words, which has to be submitted electronically by an agreed deadline. The data analysis script should be included with the paper, and will be evaluated as well.

List of project topics for which data are currently available:

1. What are the costs and benefits of employee turnover to the firm?

2. What are the predictors of employee turnover?

3. Do the effects of team incentives differ with team size and structure? 

4. Does the structure of employee turnover moderate its performance consequences?

5. What are the consequences of firm downsizing announcements for employee performance?

6. How transparent should salary information be in an organisation?

Note on the number of participants: given the list of project topics, the number of participants is limited.

Note on the data: The data used in this seminar are strictly for teaching purposes. All data coming from real firms and individuals have been anonymized, which means that no specific individuals, workplaces or firms can be identified from the ID variables in the dataset, and the economic variables, such as sales, profits or wages are rescaled by multiplying their original values by an unknown coefficient. This is done for data protection purposes. Divulging any of the datasets shared with the seminar participants is useless.

SWS: 2
ECTS: 4

Prof. Nick Zubanov

Language: English

Wednesday, 17:00 - 18:30 pm ( fortnightly), room R712
Thursday, 11:45 - 13:15 pm (fortnightly), room G300
(beginning of the lectures in the first lecture week of the summer term)

The lecture is for those, who didn´t write / didn´t pass the exam in second semester.

The lectures will be recorded. The recording of the on site lectures you can find here.
The online lectures will be recorded too and you can find them on ILIAS. (Please register on ZEuS during registration period to enter into the ILIAS course.)

Modern life can hardly be imagined without organizations – groups of individuals united in the pursuit of own as well as common goals. Organizations create wealth that benefit us all. Yet, they can also do real harm to the society. This course seeks to understand the economic motives behind the decisions taken by organizations. Such understanding is useful for predicting organizations’ behavior and designing good governance policies. The course consists of two large parts. In the first part of the course, we study the behavior of organizations on markets, focusing on the economic analysis of competition between firms. In the second part, we go inside organizations and study their internal structure: how decision rights are assigned and tasks allocated between different units, how incentives to perform are provided, and how the performance relevant for incentives is measured. We use game theory and microeconomics as study tools throughout the course. The course consists of bi-weekly lectures and bi-weekly tutorials. 

The tutorials will start in the 4th lecture week from 29.04.24 on:

Tutorials:

1. Parallelgruppe: Monday, 11:45 - 13:15 pm (fortnightly) in Room E404
2. Parallelgruppe: Wednesday, 10:00 - 11:30 am (fortnightly) in Room P603
3. Parallelgruppe: Thursday, 17:00 - 18:30 pm (fortnightly) in Room R512

Save the date:
On Friday, 12.07.2024, 13:30 - 15:00 will be a special Q&A-session in Room G201 for all students and all three groups!!!

Prof. Nick Zubanov

Wednesday, 8:15 - 9:45 am, fortnightly, Room F425
Thursday, 10:00 - 11:30 am, fortnightly, Room E402

Please find all terms in ZEuS

Language: English

This course offers a more advanced treatment of the key issues in personnel economics, and is a follow-up on the Personnel Economics I course (taking which is advisable although not absolutely necessary, since lecture slides are available). The course focusses on the factors that motivate employee performance. Beyond monetary incentives, we will study the topics of leadership, authority, teams, and the importance of social interactions at work. As in Personnel Economics I, we will apply the tools of microeconomics to understanding personnel issues, and will rely on empirical evidence from academic studies to confront theories with the real world. Therefore, a good knowledge of microeconomics and econometrics will be of great help to make the most of the course.

2 tutorials (1 hour):

1. Parallelgruppe: Tuesday, 10:00 - 11:30 am, fortnightly, Room D432
2. Parallelgruppe: Thursday, 17:00 - 18:30 pm, fortnighlty, Room D432

Please register at ZEuS, to become a member in the Ilias course!

Prof. Dr. Nick Zubanov

All terms of the lecure you find here.

This course brings together perspectives from the disciplines of economics and HR management to produce a broad introduction to the key issues in managing employee compensation and benefits (C&B). The course consists of three parts.

The first part of the course will cover the theoretical foundations of wage setting under complete and incomplete information, discussing in particular the topics of efficiency wages, incentive pay and performance evaluation, and relating the above theoretical foundations to the actually observed C&B practices.

The second part of the course will present empirical evidence on the effects of C&B practices on organizational performance, using a selection of famous academic journal articles and case studies.

The role of C&B in strategic management of human resources will be discussed in the third part of the course, with some practical implications for the design of C&B schemes.

Upon a successful completion of the course, students will develop an understanding of C&B as a set of interrelated management practices and its importance as a factor shaping organizational performance. They should be in a position to make informed decisions on the best configuration of C&B to use in a given situation.

To make the most of the course, students should have, or be prepared to gain, a background in microeconomics (especially the principal-agent theory) and good working knowledge of maths (derivatives, integrals, optimization) and statistics (regression analysis).

A written exam counts for 100% of the final course grade. Past exam papers will be provided

2 tutorials

All terms of the tutorials you find here. The tutorial will start in the 3rd. week of lectures.