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This article explores the employment impact of innovation activity, taking into account both R&D expenditures and embodied technological change (ETC). We use a novel panel data set covering 265 innovative Italian firms over the period 1998-2010. The main outcome from the proposed fixed-effect estimations is a labor-friendly nature of total innovation expenditures; however, this positive effect is barely significant when the sole in-house R&D expenditures are considered and fades away when ETC is included as a proxy for innovation activities. Moreover, the positive employment impacts of innovation activities and R&D expenditures are totally due to firms operating in high-tech industries and large companies, while no job creation due to technical change is detectable in traditional sectors and SMEs.

This paper addresses, both theoretically and empirically, the sectoral patterns of job creation and job destruction in order to distinguish the alternative effects of embodied vs disembodied technological change operating into a two-sector economy. Disembodied technological change turns out to positively affect employment dynamics in the “upstream” sectors, while expansionary investment does so in the “downstream” industries. However, these labour-friendly impacts are barely significant from a statistical point of view. Conversely, the replacement of obsolete capital vintages tends to exert a negative impact on labour demand and this effect turns out to be highly significant.

We investigate whether labor mobility can be a distinct source of growth by studying the productivity impact of business visits (BVs), vis-à-vis that of other well-known drivers of productivity enhancement. Our analysis uses an unbalanced panel—covering on average 16 sectors per year in ten countries during the period 1998–2011—which combines unique and novel data on BVs sourced from the US National Business Travel Association with Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) data on R&D and capital formation. We find that mobility through BVs is an effective mechanism to improve productivity, being about half that obtained by investing in R&D. This relevant finding invites viewing short-term mobility as a strategic mechanism and prospective policy tool to overcome productivity slowdowns and foster economic growth.

Using a unique firm-level database comprising the top European R&D investors over the period 2002–2013 and running LSDVC estimates, this study finds a significant labor-friendly impact of R&D expenditures. However, this positive employment effect appears limited in magnitude and entirely due to the medium- and high-tech sectors, while no effect can be detected in the low-tech industries. From a policy point of view, this outcome supports the EU2020 strategy but—taking into account that most European economies are specialized in low-tech activities—is also worrying in terms of future perspectives of the European labor market.

The aim of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, the economic insights on the employment impact of technological change are discussed covering both classical theories and updated theoretical and empirical analyses. On the other hand, an empirical test is provided; in particular, longitudinal data—covering manufacturing and service sectors over the 1998–2011 period for 11 European countries—are used to run GMM-SYS and LSDVC estimates. Two are the main results: (1) a significant labor-friendly impact of R&D expenditures (mainly related to product innovation) is found; yet, this positive employment effect appears to be entirely due to medium and high-tech sectors, while no effect can be detected in low-tech industries; (2) capital formation is found to be negatively related to employment; this outcome suggests a possible labor-saving effect due to the embodied technological change incorporated in gross investment (mainly related to process innovation).

This paper discusses the link between R&D and productivity across the European industrial and service sectors. The empirical analysis is based on both the European sectoral OECD data and on a unique micro-longitudinal database consisting of 532 top European R&D investors. The main conclusions are as follows. First, the R&D stock has a significant positive impact on labor productivity; this general result is largely consistent with previous literature in terms of the sign, the significance, and the magnitude of the estimated coefficients. More interestingly, both at sectoral and firm levels the R&D coefficient increases monotonically (both in significance and magnitude) when we move from the low-tech to the medium- and high-tech sectors. This outcome means that corporate R&D investment is more effective in the high-tech sectors and this may need to be taken into account when designing policy instruments (subsidies, fiscal incentives, etc.) in support of private R&D. However, R&D investment is not the sole source of productivity gains; technological change embodied in gross investment is of comparable importance on aggregate and is the main determinant of productivity increase in the low-tech sectors. Hence, an economic policy aiming to increase productivity in the low-tech sectors should support overall capital formation

Recent empirical literature has introduced the ‘Skill Biased Organizational Change’ (SBOC) hypothesis, according to which organizational change can be considered as one of the main causes of the skill bias (increase in the number of highly skilled workers) exhibited by manufacturing employment in developed countries. This paper focuses on the importance of the SBOC with respect to the more traditional ‘Skill Biased Technological Change’ in driving the skill composition of workers in the Italian machinery sector. A dynamic panel data analysis is proposed which uses a unique firm-level dataset. The results show that both skilled and unskilled workers are negatively affected by technological change, while organizational change—which in turn may be linked to new technologies—is positively linked to skilled workers. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Many empirical studies have shown how technological change, organisational change and globalisation can be alternatively (or jointly) seen as causes of skill bias. In this paper, after discussing some evidence on the G7 countries which shows a clear upskilling trend in manufacturing industries over the 1980s, an illustrative example is provided.The panel analysis of a sample of 488 Italian manufacturing firms shows how the upskilling trend of employment is a function of the reorganisational strategy adopted by firms, while technological change and FDI seem to play negligible roles.

The job creation effect of business R&D is tested applying the dynamic LSDVC estimator to a longitudinal database covering 677 European companies over the period 1990–2008. Job creation is detected in services and high-tech manufacturing, but not in traditional sectors.

History has seen periods of change biased in favour of the unskilled: this was the case during the transition from the artisan-based to the factory-based system of production (Marx, 1961, Book I, Chap. XIII; Goldin and Katz, 1998), and of the massive introduction of Tayloristic methods in the 20th century (Braverman, 1974).

Previous studies have suggested that technological change is the main cause of the recent increase in demand for highly skilled workers in developed countries. However, a more recent strand of literature has also introduced the “Skill Biased Organisational Change” hypothesis, according to which the increasing diffusion of new organisational practices within firms plays a role in the increasing demand for skilled workers. We estimate a SUR model for a sample of 400 Italian manufacturing firms, showing that upskilling is more a function of reorganisational strategy than a consequence of technological change alone. Moreover, some evidence of superadditive effects emerges, which is consistent with the notion that technology and organisation jointly affect the demand for labour.