Dr. Yuanyang Liu
Haslam College of Business
University of Tennessee
Friday, February 3, 2023
Tickle 410 2:15-3:15pm
Abstract: Employee turnover has attracted interest from managers and researchers for over a century. However, the existing literature has paid little attention to the predictive knowledge of identifying the most quit-prone future employees. In this paper, we focus on scalable turnover prediction across firm boundaries to support both talent retention and acquisition using publicly available online employee profiles and propose a framework for employee turnover prediction. By tracking employee job histories across different firms over time, we can observe an employee’s ties with other employees in outside firms resulting in our proposal for an external employee network structure based on propinquity and homophily. We further propose employee external firm relational capital measures based on network embeddings that are effective in predicting the most quit-prone employees across firms. Our results demonstrate the importance of the proposed network perspective of employees’ external ties in predicting job turnover. I will also discuss using employee turnover outcome to test the skill complementarity between employees within the firm. This is done by utilizing an Instrumental Variable based on the randomness in the H-1B visa lottery and a 2SLS design. We find that a one percentage point increase in a firm’s proportion of IT skill employees leads to an average decrease of 0.007 percentage points in the turnover probability for the firm’s employees. Existing studies have demonstrated evidence of IT business value at the organization level. This paper contributes to the IT business value literature by presenting the granular individual level skill complementarity as a specific mechanism for the IT business value generating process.
Bio: Dr. Yuanyang Liu is an Assistant Professor of Business Analytics and Statistics in the Haslam College of Business at The University of Tennessee. Prior to joining The University of Tennessee, He earned a Ph.D. degree in Management Science and an M.S. degree in Economics from Tippie College of Business, University of Iowa. His research interest centers on business analytics with a specific focus on the labor market and employee career related questions.