IPK, 5th Floor Conference Room
The sociologist Olivier Godechot conducts research for the Maurice Halbwachs Center at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and for the Quantitative Sociology Laboratory. His research focuses on wages and bonuses in the Financial Industry. Godechot also conducts research on the hiring processes and networks of the academic world.
He has published "Working Rich: Salaries, Bonus and Appropriation of Profits in the Financial Industry" (2007) and 'The Traders: Sociological Essays of Finance Markets" (2001).
For more information: http://olivier.godechot.free.fr
Selected Work (Abstracts)
"'Hold-up' in Finance: The Conditions of Possibility for High Bonuses in the Financial Industry"
Compensation in the financial industry is often very high and the comprehension of their mode of formation is a key for the comprehension of the wage-labor nexus. The fact that some employees gain the power to make holdups constitutes a better explanation than optimal incentive to make efforts. An exemplary case of hold-up enables us to understand its mechanism. Two heads of a dealing room of a large bank were granted ten and seven million euros of bonus for the year 2000 as they threatened to leave for a rival bank with their entire team. This case makes it possible to outline the mechanism of hold-up: the control of transferable assets enables them the threaten the firm with damages is she does not accept a favorable renegotiation for the employee. This mechanism is all the more frequent as protections are relatively inefficient. As a result, we draw a different view of the financial labor market: less like a market of persons and personal competencies than like a market of firm's assets, collectively produced and carried by people who organize their transfer.
This event is invitation only.