U.S. Firm Personnel Records for Management Employees, 1969-1988

Confidential personnel records for all management employees of a medium-sized U.S. service firm from 1969 to 1988. The data includes employee ID, age, sex, race, education, job title, salary, bonus, salary grade, and performance rating. Principal investigators from Harvard University Press used these records to study the firm's internal labor market and wage policy.

Use Cases

• Analyzing wage and bonus progression based on job level and performance rating mentioned in the description.
• Studying promotion patterns and career mobility within a management hierarchy based on job title and level data.
• Modeling the relationship between demographic factors like age, sex, and race and compensation outcomes.
• Investigating the structure of an internal labor market based on longitudinal employee records spanning two decades.

Strengths

• Covers a 20-year period from 1969 to 1988, providing longitudinal insights.
• Includes detailed records for all management employees, with variables like salary, bonus, and an 8-level job hierarchy.
• The dataset is described as largely complete, with robustness checks performed for statistics from 1969-1985.

Limitations

• Bonus data is only available for the years 1981-1988.
• Job title data is missing for roughly 10% of employees and half of new hires in 1987-1988, complicating level assignment.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.

Provenance

Source

Harvard University Press (George P. Baker)

Collection Method

Yearend backup personnel tapes from a single medium-sized U.S. service firm.

Time Range

1969-1988

Geography

United States (specific location not stated)