Techies, Trade, and Skill-Biased Productivity

24.05.2019 12:30 – 13:30

GENEVA TRADE AND DEVELOPMENT WORKSHOP / ABSTRACT

We study the impact of firm level choices of ICT, R&D, exporting and importing on the evolution of productivity and its bias towards skilled occupations. We use a novel measure of the propensity of a firm to engage in technology investment and adoption: its employment of workers with STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) skills and experience who we call “techies”. We develop a methodology for estimating firm level productivity that allows us to measure both Hicks-neutral and skill-augmenting technology differences, and apply this to administrative data on French firms in the entire private sector from 2009 to 2013. We find that techies and importing of intermediate inputs raise skill-biased productivity, while imports also raise Hicks-neutral productivity. We also find that higher firm-level skill biased productivity raises low-skill employment even as it raises the ratio of skilled to unskilled workers. This is because of the cost-reducing effect of higher productivity. The techie and trade effects are large, and can account for much of the aggregate increase in skilled employment from 2009 to 2013.

Lieu

Bâtiment: IHEID

Graduate Institute
Maison de la Paix
Petal 2, Room S4
2 Chemin Eugène-Rigot
1202 Geneva

Organisé par

Faculté d'économie et de management
Institute of Economics and Econometrics

Intervenant-e-s

James HARRIGAN, University of Virginia, USA

entrée libre

Classement

Catégorie: Séminaire

Inscription

Date limite d'inscription: 23.05.2019

Registration is mandatory including for people with WTO accreditation. If you wish to attend, please fill the online form (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeWFzIKO2E20dFqai-ehyu68nH4p0WObl7889dpjjuJStt-pQ/viewform) at the latest by cob on 23 May 2019.

Plus d'infos

www.unige.ch/gsem/en/research/seminars/iee/

Contact: missing email