Talent poaching and job rotation

Diego Battiston, Miguel Espinosa and Shuo Liu

Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Abstract: Firms allocate workers to clients to provide services. On the job, workers acquire skills that increase their client-specific productivity and therefore raise the probability that clients poach them. In this paper, we advance the understanding of this important, yet understudied feature of service industries. We show, both theoretically and empirically, that in order to mitigate poaching risk firms may forgo potential productivity gains by moving workers from one client to the other. Focusing on a security service-industry firm in Colombia, we find that an increase in client-specific experience increases both workers’ productivity and probability that the workers are poached. After a policy change that forbids talent poaching, the firm sharply decreased the frequency of rotation, especially for workers who were more likely to be poached before the policy change. The theoretical model we propose is consistent with these empirical patterns and substantiates the broad applicability of the studied mechanism.

Keywords: talent poaching; job rotation; outsourcing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D22 J24 L84 M21 M51 M54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://econ-papers.upf.edu/papers/1768.pdf Whole Paper (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Talent Poaching and Job Rotation (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:upf:upfgen:1768

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).