On the Determinants of Organizational Forgetting

Brachet, Tanguy and David, Guy (2009): On the Determinants of Organizational Forgetting.

Abstract

Studies of organizational learning and forgetting identify potential channels through which the firm’s production experience is lost. While the ability to distinguish between these channels has implications for efficient resource allocation within the firm, to date, their relative importance has been ignored. This paper develops a framework for eliciting the contributions of labor turnover and human capital depreciation to organizational forgetting. We apply our framework to a novel dataset of ambulance companies and their workforce. We find evidence of organizational forgetting, which results from sizable skill decay and turnover effects, with the latter having twice the magnitude of the former.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: Organizational Forgetting, Labor Turnover, Skill Decay, Learning‐by‐Doing
• Subjects: I - Health, Education, and Welfare > I1 - Health > I11 - Analysis of Health Care Markets; L - Industrial Organization > L2 - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior > L23 - Organization of Production; J - Labor and Demographic Economics > J2 - Demand and Supply of Labor > J24 - Human Capital ; Skills ; Occupational Choice ; Labor Productivity

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