The Skill Bias Effect of Technological and Organisational Change: Evidence and Policy Implications

By M. Piva, Enrico Santarelli, M. Vivarelli. Social Science Research Network, 2005

348 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Previous empirical literature has shown that technological change can be considered the main cause of the skill bias (increase in the number of highly skilled workers) exhibited by manufacturing employment in developed countries over the last decades. However, recent papers have also introduced the "Skill Biased Organisational Change" hypothesis. We estimate a SUR model for a sample of 400 Italian manufacturing firms, showing that upskilling is more a function of the reorganisational strategy than a consequence of technological change alone. Moreover, some evidence of superadditive effects emerges, consistently with the theoretical hypothesis of a coevolution of technology and organisation.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f9983b8f6b2b194100eb9492bb387d71cb93c234

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Citations in the corpus

Young firms and innovation: A microeconometric analysis (2012, background): “…crowding out effects operating only partially (see Busom, 2000). other forms of innovation (such as organizational change, see Bresnahan et al 2002; Hitt and Brynjolfsson, 2002; Piva et al, 2005) (OTHERIN) should be complementary to the four innovative inputs described in the previous section.”
Effects of organizational innovation and technological innovation capabilities on firm performance: evidence from firms in China’s Pearl River Delta (2019, background): “…have recognized that a ‘complementary relationship’ often extends to OI in which firms connect with various innovation efforts (Battisti and Stoneman 2010; Carboni and Russu 2018; Damanpour, Walker, and Avellaneda 2009; Martínez-Ros and Labeaga 2009; Piva, Santarelli, and Vivarelli 2005).”
Innovation, Employment and Skills in Advanced and Developing Countries: A Survey of the Literature (2011, background): “…difficult to be defined and measured, recent literature has empirically proven that the so-called “skill-biased organizational change” is as important as the “skill-biased technological change” (see, for instance, Caroli and Van Reenen, 2001; Greenan, 2003; Piva, Santarelli, and Vivarelli, 2005).”
R&D drivers and age: : Are young firms different? (2014, background): “operating for more than seven or eight years, while Reid (2003) provides evidence of an inverse relationship between a firm’s age and its debt ratio.”
Work design influences: A synthesis of multilevel factors that affect the design of jobs (2017, background): “Rather, changes in work design might occur because the introduction of ICTs into high-skill jobs is often accompanied by practices that increase discretion and variety such as self managing teams, delayering and the decentralization of responsibility (Bresnahan, et al., 2002; Piva et al., 2005).”
Technological regimes and sectoral differences in productivity growth (2007, background): “One is data on skills disaggregated by industry collected by the OECD, which refer to a restricted sample of advanced countries in the early 1990s (Pianta, 2005; Piva et al., 2005).”
Measuring the impact of innovative human capital on small firms' propensity to innovate (2015, background): “…a sufficient criterion for competitive advantage in terms of firm-level innovation: in fact, the proportion of skilled workers has increased in the context of developed countries, as the rate of technological change increases, there is an increase in demand for skilled labour (Piva et al., 2005).”
Competencies for young European higher education graduates: labor market mismatches and their payoffs (2008, background): “value and content of the competencies required (Mariachristina et al., 2003).”
The internationalization of small and medium-sized enterprises: the effect of family management, human capital and foreign ownership (2010, background): “2 See Piva et al. (2005) for an empirical analysis on the relationship between organizational/ technological change and skills in Italy.”
Technology and employment: Mass unemployment or job creation? Empirical evidence from European patenting firms (2018, background): “In a nutshell, the relevant debate started in the ‘90s focusing on the so called “Skill-Biased Technological Change” (SBTC) and pointing to the fact that “technological unemployment” was far more likely for the low skilled and less educated workers (see Acemoglu and Autor, 2011; Berman et al., 1994;”
Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Development (2009, positive): “Piva et al. (2005) find evidence of a mutually reinforcing effect.”