information:highlighting
Personnel economics: hiring and incentives

At the micro level, one sub-discipline eliciting increased attention in recent decades is analysis of internal labour markets, that is, within firms (or other organisations), studied in personnel economics from the perspective of personnel management. By contrast, external labour markets "imply that workers move somewhat fluidly between firms and wages are determined by some aggregate process where firms do not have significant discretion over wage setting." The focus is on "how firms establish, maintain, and end employment relationships and on how firms provide incentives to employees," including models and empirical work on incentive systems and as constrained by economic efficiency and risk/incentive tradeoffs relating to personnel compensation.