TY  - JOUR
AU  - Bushnell, James B
AU  - Wolfram, Catherine
TI  - The Guy at the Controls: Labor Quality and Power Plant Efficiency
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 13215
PY  - 2007
Y2  - July 2007
DO  - 10.3386/w13215
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13215
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13215.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
James B. Bushnell
Department of Economics
One Shields Ave.
University of California, Davis
Davis, CA 95616
Tel: 530/752-3129
E-Mail: jbbushnell@ucdavis.edu

Catherine Wolfram
Haas School of Business
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA  94720-1900
Tel: 510/642-2588
Fax: 510/643-1420
E-Mail: wolfram@haas.berkeley.edu
M1  - published as James B. Bushnell, Catherine Wolfram. "The Guy at the Controls: Labor Quality and Power Plant Efficiency," in Richard B. Freeman and Kathryn L. Shaw, editors, "International Differences in the Business Practices and Productivity of Firms" University of Chicago Press (2009)

AB  - This paper examines the impact of individual human operators on the fuel efficiency of power plants. Although electricity generation is a fuel and capital intensive enterprise, anecdotal evidence, interviews, and empirical analysis support the hypothesis that labor, particularly power plant operators, can have a non-trivial impact on the operating efficiency of the plant. We present evidence to demonstrate these effects and survey the policies and practices of electricity producing firms that either reduce or exacerbate fuel efficiency differences across individual plant operators.
ER  -