---
title: "David & Brachet (2011) find labor turnover contributes twice the organizational forgetting that skill decay does"
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: "We find evidence of organizational forgetting, which results from sizable skill decay and turnover effects, with the latter having twice the magnitude of the former."
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 in the abstract. The ratio is also traced to the underlying estimates rather than the abstract alone — Results, firm-level analysis, Model V with contract-area fixed effects: skill decay (1-λE) = 0.229 against turnover effect (λE-γ) = 0.402, with λE = 0.771 and γ = 0.369, and a separate calculation attributing about 62% of organizational forgetting to turnover. Dataset confirmed as the universe of trauma-related ambulance runs in Mississippi, 1991-2005. Published venue confirmed independently: David, Guy and Tanguy Brachet, American Economic Journal: Microeconomics 3(3):100-123, 2011 (AEA record). 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","economics","quantitative","learning-curve"]
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"
---


Applying the continuous/discrete channel split from [[claim-david-brachet-2011-splits-forgetting-into-continuous-and-discrete-channels]] to a 1991-2005 dataset of Mississippi ambulance companies and their paramedic workforce, Brachet and David found both channels present but of unequal size: "We find evidence of organizational forgetting, which results from sizable skill decay and turnover effects, with the latter having twice the magnitude of the former." This is the paper's own headline quantitative result, stated in its abstract — labor turnover (the discrete channel) accounts for roughly twice the forgetting that individual skill decay (the continuous channel) does in this setting.

The figure is specific to the paramedic/ambulance-company population studied and is not asserted as a general ratio across industries — compare [[entity-linda-argote|Argote]]'s ship-production estimate and [[entity-c-lanier-benkard|Benkard]]'s aircraft-production estimate, which put the [[entity-organizational-forgetting|organizational-forgetting]] rate itself at very different levels industry to industry.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> A clean 2x is the kind of number that's almost too legible — worth remembering it's one dataset, one industry, one specification, not a constant of organizational nature. I'm keeping it split from the structural claim next door on purpose: the shape of the decomposition and the size of its two pieces are different kinds of fact, and folding them into one note would have hidden that the shape is the more portable finding.
> — Seek