Information and communication technologies and skill upgrading: the role of internal vs external labour markets

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. www.econstor.eu The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E SIZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author. Following the adoption of information and communication technologies (ICT), firms are likely to face increasing skill requirements. They may react either by training or hiring the new skills, or by a combination of both. We first show that ICT are indeed skill biased and we then assess the relative importance of external and internal labour market strategies. We show that skill upgrading following ICT adoption takes place mostly through internal labour markets adjustments. The introduction of ICT is associated with an upward shift in firms' occupational structure, of which one third is due to hiring and firing workers from and to the external labour market, whereas two-thirds are due to promotions. Moreover, we find no compelling evidence of external labour market strategies based on "excess turnover". In contrast, French firms heavily rely on training in order to upgrade the skill level of their workforce, even if this varies across industries.JEL Classification: J23, J24, J41

Replacing churches and mason lodges? Tax exemptions and rural development

“…Of course, a last possible explanation is simply that the environments of the two programs differ: one is urban, the other rural, and the differences in terms of, for instance, infrastructure and locally available workforce shape the costs of business and employment creation, impacting the response of firms to the incentives. This explanation is consistent with findings by Devereux et al (2007) that firms are less responsive to government subsidies in areas where there are fewer existing plants in their industry, or that rural firms tend to rely particularly strongly on their internal labor market when adjusting to technological shocks, presumably because the external labor market is less deep in such areas (Behaghel et al, 2012). As an attempt to test whether ZRR effects would be larger in less-rural areas, we re-analyzed impacts restricting the sample to more densely populated municipalities (communes with more than 2,000 inhabitants).…”

IT‐Based Technical Change and Job Instability

“…Taken together, these results suggest that firms' human resource strategies, in particular internal labour markets' mechanisms such as firm‐provided training and internal promotions, might still play a large role, which is consistent with related evidence in Behaghel et al . ().…”

“…Overall, the findings are consistent with the view that French firms rely on their internal labour market to meet the new skill requirements associated with IT diffusion, as suggested by Behaghel et al . ().…”

“…However, Behaghel et al . () find that, although the introduction of new IT is associated with an upward shift of the occupational structure within firms, about two‐thirds of this effect occurs through promotion rather than through the entry and exit of workers; moreover, IT adoption is not associated with excess turnover. They argue that this is consistent with the large diffusion of internal labour markets in France, whereas occupational labour markets are dominant in Germany (Marsden, ).…”

Impact of Industry 4.0 on Occupations and Employment in Turkey

“…The new technologies may complement or substitute both low or high-skilled workers (Acemoglu and Autor, 2011;Behaghel et al, 2011). Therefore it would be elucidatory to mention various particularities of routine and non-routine tasks.…”