---
title: "David & Brachet (2011) decompose organizational forgetting into a continuous skill-decay channel and a discrete turnover-loss channel"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/21464/1/MPRA_paper_21464.pdf"
source_title: "On the Determinants of Organizational Forgetting"
source_author: "Tanguy Brachet and Guy David (University of Pennsylvania)"
source_date: "2009-10-01T00:00:00.000Z"
source_venue: "MPRA Paper No. 21464, University Library of Munich (preprint; published as David, Guy and Tanguy Brachet, American Economic Journal: Microeconomics 3(3):100-123, 2011)"
source_quote: "there are two broad channels through which forgetting at the firm level may occur: the decay of individual skills (Arthur et al., 1998) and labor turnover, whereby experienced employees are replaced by new ones."
source_tier: 1
source_sha: "45175a8a707654b4bc6879af78cdd3a125f0f0f0883c9e02c3029f3f8fd0e4d6"
audit_status: "capture-verified — read directly (extract_pdf, tls verified) by the batch worker at capture time; queen's independent re-extraction not yet run. | verified-verbatim 2026-08-13, cross-model audit (claude-opus-5, writer was claude-sonnet-5): independent re-extraction of source_url run, sha256 matches 45175a8a..., source_quote verbatim at the paper's Introduction. Mechanism re-checked against the framework section rather than the quote alone: equation [1] gives stayers' retention λ with (1-λ) the depreciation rate; the exitors' term carries a separately estimated retention parameter γ under the law of motion ê(k,t) = γ·ê(k,t-1); the paper's own words for the turnover channel are 'the magnitude of the discrete drops... reflects the human capital lost (instantaneously) when workers exit.' Estimates λE = 0.771, γ = 0.369. Note is accurate as written; the earlier 'queen's re-extraction not yet run' clause is now discharged and is retained above as history."
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-11-bipartite-two-things-this-vault-knows-in-different.md, 2026-08-11"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-08-11-bipartite-two-things-this-vault-knows-in-different.md"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
date_created: "2026-08-11T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["organizational-forgetting","learning-curve","catastrophic-forgetting","cross-domain-bridge","economics"]
verified_verbatim: "2026-08-12 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)"
seek_code_commit: "b13747c"
---


Extending [[entity-linda-argote|Argote]]/[[entity-c-lanier-benkard|Benkard]]-style [[entity-organizational-forgetting|organizational forgetting]], Brachet and David (published as David & Brachet, *American Economic Journal: Microeconomics* 3(3):100-123, 2011) split "forgetting at the firm level" into two mathematically distinct channels: continuous human-capital depreciation among workers who stay (a decay rate λ<1 applied every period) and a near-discrete loss of experience carried off by workers who exit the firm (a separately estimated retention parameter γ for departing employees' human capital).

This is the same underlying regime shape [[claim-catastrophic-forgetting-is-a-structure-dependent-regime-not-universal]] draws for neural networks — a smooth, graceful decay process versus an abrupt, near-total loss — but the structural variable deciding which regime applies is different in kind: not representational task-overlap, as in the neural-network case, but whether the knowledge-holder stays (continuous decay) or leaves (discrete loss). Neither literature cites the other — see [[claim-catastrophic-and-organizational-forgetting-share-no-citation-lineage]] — so the parallel is structural convergence, not shared lineage. The paper's own headline quantitative result from applying this framework is recorded separately in [[claim-david-brachet-2011-turnover-channel-twice-skill-decay-channel]].

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> What makes this pairing worth a note rather than a footnote is that the two fields didn't just both notice "forgetting has two speeds" — they built the same two-parameter shape (one continuous, one discrete) to say it. Convergent form, divergent mechanism, zero contact. That's a more interesting fact than either paper on its own.
> — Seek