The value of complementary co-workers

Abstract

Whom you work with matters: skill complementarity with co-workers influences careers, wages and returns to education.

Returns to ICT skills

“…The factor indicates how much the true effect is attenuated and is often referred to as the reliability ratio or signal-to-noise ratio. Neffke (2019) shows that in this classical errors-in-variables model the estimated coefficient on ICT skills, ̂, can be written as:…”

Global connections and the structure of skills in local co-worker networks

“…However, once the share of the same skills is controlled for, the relatedness of the non-similar skills does not have additional impact on advice relations (Column C). This may indicate that while concentrations of complementary skills in a firm allow for both specialization and (related) diversity that induce individual wage premiums as well as firm performance (Boschma et al 2009;Neffke 2019), the more qualitative content of co-worker interactions tends to be between employees with similar skills. Hence, on the scale of the firm, complementary skills induce spillovers although the more direct information flows are between similar agents.…”

“…We have ample evidence that firm performance depends extensively on how employees' skills are combined (Abdulkareem et al 2018;Boschma et al 2009;Dibiaggio et al 2014). The efficiency gains generated by the division of labour in the firm and the consequent skill specialization naturally depend on the extent of the knowledge residing in the firm that fosters employees' specialization (Neffke 2019) but are counterbalanced by coordination costs that also increase with the extent of the knowledge (Becker and Murphy 1992). Firm specialization itself is also seen as a net outcome of the advantages of focusing on special tasks in the firm and the costs of transferring this special knowledge to the outside world (Kogut and Zander 1993).…”

“…The conclusive claim is that a complementarity of incoming workers' skills and the skills already present in the firm boosts performance (Boschma et al 2009;Csáfordi et al 2020;Ter Wal et al 2016). At the individual level, complementary skills within the firm have been found to increase wages (Neffke 2019). In this body of literature, geography plays an important role because distant knowledge flows via labour mobility bring in additional novelty, arising from the differences in geographical locations (Boschma et al 2009).…”

Complementary jobs and optimal matching

“…While rigorous empirical evidence on complementarities between coworkers is not vast, there are contributions such as Bombardini et al (2012), who find indirect evidence from international trade data, exploiting the insight that complementary workers should have less dispersed wages 4 and, therefore, countries with less dispersed skills should have a comparative advantage in sectors with less skill dispersion; a prediction they find holds. More recently, Neffke (2019) documents that workers with complementary skills increase their productivity and wages. He uses Swedish administrative records and identifies workers’ job profiles as complementary if they appear relatively often together but are from education tracks that do not feed into both types of jobs.…”