ELIOT SHERMAN

The audience for this elective is primarily MBAs and Executive MBAs. I advise students to abandon the idea that there are functional systems of reward allocation operating within organizations. There is no such thing as objective merit; the people who should be paying attention to their subordinates' performance will do so haphazardly, if at all; and, as a result, some of the most significant contributors toil unrecognized in relative obscurity. The course content I have assembled represents my best attempt to ensure that students avoid this fate.

The papers I have selected for this course address an array of phenomenon, including hiring, performance, wages, and mobility. I leverage these readings toward a supplemental goal: Determining how to theoretically situate - or "frame" - a paper’s contribution. Toward this end, I require each student to “workshop” one research project throughout the course. (The use of “workshop” as a verb, while insufferable, is sadly the correct nomenclature.) Each final paper that students submit must include some component of data analysis.

I include this here while acknowledging a substantial caveat: Course evaluations are a noisy diagnostic of teaching ability and are upwardly biased in favor of white, male faculty.