Attrition -- the loss of employees to turnover, retirement, or layoffs -- is one of the most important challenges employers face in managing a workforce. Excessive attrition can hurt business performance by impinging on productivity, morale and institutional knowledge. Understanding employment dynamics is especially timely given the increasing rate of workers leaving their job since the end of the Great Recession and the disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Doctoral degrees hold the promise of increased earnings, interesting research opportunities, and part/full time teaching positions. Some fields of PhD study have a long and storied history, like Chemistry and Physics, whereas other fields are new and rapidly growing, such as Machine Learning and Computer Science. One question we set out to answer was how PhD fields have changed over time, and if there are general patterns we can identify to predict changes in PhD field growth?
Big tech companies have long been considered highly attractive places to work. They pay well, offer top notch perks, and are full of talented people working on difficult technical problems. Being tech companies, most of their workforce is composed of jobs that require technical skills.
Consulting firms have long been a career launching pad to young professionals, promising a feather in the proverbial career cap to employees in exchange for grueling work hours. A key part of this bargain is that consulting firms select top students which add to the prestige of the firm itself.
It seems like everywhere you turn there’s another company touting plans to focus on crypto. And after years of downplaying the technology, JP Morgan is the latest to join the crypto craze with the recent announcement that they are hiring for blockchain. Is this really a significant hiring trend or merely a small one laced with PR opportunities?By looking at all of the positions with the “blockchain” keyword, we’re able to identify companies with the greatest count of these positions:
Uber and Lyft have, for a long time, been the market leaders in the growing rideshare industry, but their competitive dynamics have been anything but constant. In many ways, they can be thought of as a duopoly, fighting for dominance, but in other ways, they are competing simultaneously in many local submarkets. Uber’s overall market share, relative to Lyft, has been falling over the last ten years. By breaking down this market into the territories it serves, we’re able to see this share broken down further. It appears that Uber dominates smaller markets without much competition, but Lyft has a much larger relative footprint in larger cities.
Data is one of the most valuable resources today. The companies that own and store the world's largest and most valuable data wield enormous influence. Yet despite their power, these companies are increasingly vulnerable to data breaches, a costly and reputationally damaging affair.
Understanding the long term effects of two merging companies is complex. There are the melding of cultures, product lines, egos, and, not to mention, workforces. With all these complex variables, it’s no wonder so many mergers fail, and even more miraculous when some wildly succeed. So what makes a good or bad merger, and how can we predict them better?
Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk has, on more than one occasion, promoted the idea that the automotive company is uninterested in pedigree. In a noteworthy string of tweets in February, Musk wrote, “Don’t care if you even graduated high school… Educational background is irrelevant, but all must pass hardcore coding test.”
For years, the US military has promoted the idea that the armed forces is an effective launching pad to leadership positions. We wanted to dig into this presumption and explore whether those with military backgrounds really get more senior positions once they enter the corporate world. By tracking the careers of both veterans and non-veterans, we see how military service affects seniority when compared to civilians.
For decades, many states feared that they were losing their best talent to other states with prestigious universities. This “brain drain” as it’s been known to be called, has in part been attributed to the trend of people finding work close to where they attend school. By tracking individuals who provide information about their high school education, their college education, and their first job, we see a remarkable reversal of this trend.
As the country mourns the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, we remark on the influence she had on gender equality for all Americans. This influence was perhaps most pronounced in her own profession.
Despite the recent slowdown in hiring, the race for premier talent is only heating up. Top tech companies are aggressively competing for AI engineers to secure their future from the pervasive risks of automation. Skills in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Deep Neural Networks are reaching new levels of demand as industries are preparing for the next industrial revolution.
Upward mobility is a huge concern, not just for ambitious employees, but for the workplace environment. By analyzing cohorts of employees from 1990 to 2018, we see a significant gender seniority gap that seems to be becoming smaller for younger cohorts.
There has been tremendous speculation about when a COVID-19 vaccine will be ready and what pharmaceutical companies will be involved in the manufacturing and distribution. It would be hard to find anyone whose well-being would not be dramatically improved by a vaccine.
Large industrial cities, like Detroit and Pittsburgh, have mostly been in decline over the last few decades, ushering in a new era of cities with a diverse set of industries and jobs. But in recent years that trend has reversed among technology hubs, like San Jose and Seattle. Their workforces have shifted so heavily toward engineering that they are now at risk of losing the diversity of thought that’s necessary for innovation.
In recent weeks, labor markets have appeared to stabilize as the number of new job postings has increased. But while postings have grown, the salaries associated with those postings have fallen dramatically. By tracking expected salaries from 9 million job listings since March, and controlling for changes in seniority, occupation, and city, we found that salaries have fallen by 8.8%.
For years, experts have been hailing a new era where companies can hire talent on a per project basis and labor can have a more flexible work-life balance. With the advent of many infrastructural technologies (personal websites, automated invoicing, flexible cloud storage, etc), many individuals have been taking advantage of their valuable skills and joining the freelance economy.
Skilled mathematicians, physicists, and computer scientists have long been coveted by top hedge funds and big tech companies. For years, these sectors have competed over this technical talent pool to generate profitable trading algorithms, build infrastructure, and targeted ad platforms. But commentary on this war for talent has been little more than conjecture. Who is actually winning the war to attract top talent - top hedge funds or big tech?
Differences in gender and ethnicity distributions are most dramatic within senior management. Representation among senior management drops most dramatically for female employees. The effect of being from two minority groups is smaller than what would be expected if the effects were independent.
