Boosting Productivity Via Innovation and Adoption of New Technologies: Any Role for Labor Market Institutions?
By S. Scarpetta, T. Tressel. 2004
169 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This paper presents empirical evidence on the determinants of industry-level multifactor productivity growth. It focus on traditional factors, including the process of technological catch up, human capital and R&D as well as institutional factors affecting labor adjustment costs. The link between R&D activity and productivity also depends on technological characteristics of the industries : while there is no evidence of R&D boosting productivity in low-tech industries, the effect is strong in high-tech industries, but the technology leaders tend to enjoy higher returns on R&D expenditure compared with followers. There is also evidence in the data that high labor adjustment costs (proxied by the strictness of employment protection legislation) can have a strong negative impact on productivity. In particular, when institutional settings do not allow wages or internal training to offset high hiring and firing costs, then the latter reduce incentives for innovation and adoption of new technologies, and lead to lower productivity performance.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/33f3b1c7da2a48ca4e57b56276cd605dcf04afba
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In Economics and Econometrics
Citations in the corpus
- Is flexible labour good for innovation? : Evidence from firm-level data (2014, background): “Second, the difficult or expensive firing of redundant personnel can frustrate labour-saving innovations at the firm level (Bassanini and Ernst, 2002; Scarpetta and Tressel, 2004).”
- Little innovation, many jobs. An econometric analysis of the Italian labour productivity crisis (2010, methodology): “Most studies, however, are confined to using country or sector data (Auer et al., 2005; Bassanini and Ernst, 2002; Buchele and Christiansen, 1999A, 1999B; Naastepad and Storm, 2005; Nickell and Layard, 1999; Scarpetta and Tressel, 2004).”
- Flexible labor and innovation performance : Evidence from longitudinal firm-level data (2010, background): “Second, labor market rigidity may reduce the reallocation process of labor from old and declining to newly emerging industries, and the difficulty of firing personnel might frustrate labor-saving process innovations (Bassanini and Ernst, 2002; Scarpetta and Tressel, 2004; see also Nickell and Layard”