Submission Deadline: February 15, 2024
We give preferences to full papers but will allow submission of extended abstracts too.
Papers shall be submitted to the conference email WEE2024@nfa.dk
Acceptance decisions will be send out by email March 1 2024.
Participants who wish to attend without papers and or volunteer to be discussants may also write to the email above. The maximum number of participants will be 80 people.
Conference Motivation and Themes:
The economics of working environment is a conference that aims at bringing together leading scholars from all around the world to study how organizational design and leadership impact the well-being of firms and their employees. The conference theme use the term employee well-being in a broad sense that encompasses firms’ ability to be internally sustainable, e.g., to protect employee mental and physical health, be gender neutral both in work culture and employee pay, attract talent, and reduce absenteeism. Employee well-being is a first order issue for the society at whole: As an illustrative example, almost 7 pct of the private sector workforce takes prescription drugs aimed against stress and mental health challenges and 27 pct of employees report pain symptoms on a regular basis. Implications extend far beyond the workplace: mental health is a key factor for labor productivity and individual happiness and musculoskeletal pain is equally a major source of absence, low quality of life and treatment cost. We explore the role organizational design and leadership in mitigating these challenges.
Contribution and Scientific Perspective: There is increasing interest in the ways work-related factors affect employee well-being and mental health. Medical and psychosocial research have done important research in measuring work environment, how to improve physical work environment through ao defining limit values of chemical exposure, nanoparticles, dust and the ergonomics of jobs. It has studied the effects of work environment (e.g. job strain, long work hours, pay-for performance) on employee outcomes such a heart diseases, drug use, chronical depression and leisure inactivity. Economic research on mental health has focused on person-specific or region-specific factors and less on workplace-specific factors. More broadly, researchers have also considered the effects of peers, economic circumstance and job loss/unemployment. If existing research had fully identified the determinants of work environment, the variation across firms would be small. In reality, this variation is large supporting the idea that there are “missing” factors. Rooted in organizational economics, this conference explore if these missing factors are related to how we organize work and workplaces.
Potential themes may include:
- Economic evaluation of interventions to improve the working environment
- The costs to employers and employees of a sub-optimal working environment
- The influence of the quality of working environment on the economic performance of organisations and corporations
- Effects of work environment (for example job strain, long working hours, pay-for performance) on employee outcomes such a heart diseases, drug use, chronical depression, days of absence
- Impact and costs of regulatory interventions of the working environment on the performance of the market
- Rational behaviour of agents in the labour market related to designing a good working environment
- Other topics of relevance to working environment economic
