Essays on the counterintuitive consequences of labor policies in service industries

In essays one and two, I examine how unstable schedules affect financial performance. In essay one, using 52 weeks of data from over 1,000 stores and more than 15,000 employees of a specialty retailer, I estimate the effect of unstable schedules on store productivity. I use an instrumental variable approach and a natural experiment to partially address the possible endogeneity of scheduling decisions. I find evidence that increasing the adequacy and consistency of employees' hours improves employee and store productivity and find partial support for the positive effect of predictability. To study the policy impact of these findings, I build a behavioral agent-based model of scheduling in essay two. My model provides a platform to conduct counterfactual analyses and thus increases the external validity of my findings.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Sloan School of Management

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Hashemian, MohammadMahdi.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Hazhir Rahmandad.

• Sloan School of Management.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/129091

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/129091