NBER Working Papers by Monika Hamori

Franchise jobs are often described as representing the epitome of the "low road" approach to managing employees: high turnover, little training, deskilled jobs, and little employee involvement, practices often seen as unsophisticated. Research on franchise operations suggests, however, that the basic operating principles and practices of franchises tend to be more sophisticated than those of equivalent independent operators. We might therefore expect their employee management practices to be more advanced as well, challenging the stereotype of franchise jobs. We use data from a national probability sample of establishments to examine the relationship between franchise status and employment practices. While descriptive statistics suggest that franchise operations use low road practices, ...

The analyses below compare the career histories and personal characteristics of the executives in the top ranks of the world's largest and most stable business operations, the Fortune 100, between 1980 and 2001. To our knowledge, there have been no prior studies of contemporary changes in the experience or attributes of executives beyond CEOs. In 2001, these executives were younger, more likely to be women, and less likely to have been Ivy League educated. Most important, they got to the executive suite about four years faster than in 1980 and did so by holding fewer jobs on the way to the top. (In particular, women in 2001 got to their executive jobs faster than their male counterparts --there were no women executives in the Fortune 100 in 1980). Executives in 2001 also spent about fi...