An employer-employee panel is used to study whether the movement of workers across firms is a channel of unintended diffusion of R&D-generated knowledge. Somewhat surprisingly, hiring workers from others' R&D labs to one's own does not seem to be a significant spillover channel. Hiring workers previously in R&D to one's non-R&D activities, however, boosts both productivity and profitability. This is interpreted as evidence that these workers transmit knowledge that can be readily copied and implemented without much additional R&D effort.
We use plant-level employer-employee data in production functions and wage equations to examine whether wages are based on productivity. We use a stepwise procedure to find out how the results are influenced by the kind of data that is available. The models include shares of employee groups based on age, level and field of education, and sex. The gap between the age-related wage and productivity effects increases with age. Education increases productivity, but wage under-compensates productivity especially for those with the highest level of non-technical education. For women the results depend greatly on the specification and method used.
Using a matched worker-plant data from Finnish manufacturing, the relationships of worker characteristics, wages, and productivity are examined. The process of linking various registers on employees and plants is described in detail. The final data set includes the characteristics of plants and their employees. The plant panel data is used for estimating productivity and wage profiles according to age and seniority. At low seniority productivity increases fast, but starts to decline early. Wage profiles are not related to productivity profiles, but continue to increase with seniority. These results support the hypothesis that human capital is not firm specific, and seniority related wages are used for incentive reasons. Various components of worker turnover have an impact on productivity growth.
"The bad labour market performance of the workforce over 50 indicates that an aged workforce is often a burden for firms. Our paper seeks to investigate whether and why this is the case by providing evidence on the relation between age, seniority and experience, on the one hand, and the main components of labour costs, namely productivity and wages, on the other, for a sample of plants in three manufacturing industries ('forest', 'industrial machinery' and 'electronics') in Finland during the IT revolution in the 1990s. In 'average' industries - those not undergoing major technological shocks - productivity and wages keep rising almost indefinitely with the accumulation of either seniority (in the forest industry) or experience (in the industry producing industrial machinery). In these industries, the skill depreciation often associated with higher seniority beyond a certain threshold does not seemingly raise labour costs. In electronics, instead, the seniority-productivity profile shows a positive relation first and then becomes negative as one looks at plants with higher average seniority. This body of evidence is consistent with the idea that fast technical change brings about accelerated skill depreciation of senior workers. We cannot rule out, however, that our correlations are also simultaneously produced by worker movements across plants. The seniority-earnings profile in electronics is instead rather similar to that observed for the other industries - a likely symptom of the prevailing Finnish wage bargaining institutions which tend to make seniority one essential element of wage determination. In the end, seniority matters for labour costs, not age as such. But only in high-tech industries, not in the economy at large. This is well tuned with previous research on gross flows of workers and jobs in the US and other OECD countries which unveiled the productivity-driving role of resource reallocation (or lack thereof) between plants. To improve the employability of the elderly at times of fast technical change, public policy should thus divert resources away from preserving existing jobs and lend more attention to the retraining of old workers to ease their reallocation away from less productive plants (or plants where they have become less productive) into new jobs." Copyright (c) CEPR, CES, MSH, 2007.
Existing firms are argued to be an important source of new entrepreneurs. Yet, relatively little is known about the characteristics of firms that breed new entrepreneurs. We use a large linked employee-employer dataset to trace and characterize the types of firms which generate new entrepreneurs in Finland. We find that such transitions are rare and that smaller firms spawn new entrepreneurs more frequently than larger firms. We also find that firms' R&D intensity and, to a lesser extent, their productivity are negatively related to the probability that employees transit into entrepreneurship. These results are robust to controlling for a number of employee and employer attributes. Copyright � The editors of the "Scandinavian Journal of Economics" 2008 .
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