Documents Sorbe, Stéphane 5 results

"Significant labour market mismatches and insufficient mobility penalise employment and productivity. Mismatches have above all a skills dimension, with an excess of low-skilled workers and a possible lack of skilled workers in certain domains. Reducing the high tax wedge on low salaries and avoiding excessive minimum wage increases would support demand for low-skilled labour. In the longer term, upgrading the labour supply requires improving educational outcomes, especially of disadvantaged students, and making the school-to-work transition less abrupt. To facilitate good matching and enhance sectoral mobility, a somewhat longer duration of unemployment benefits and an upscaled Public Employment Service would be of value, as well as greater focus on reintegration in the public works programme and more efficient and developed lifelong learning. Besides skills mismatches, important geographic mismatches are illustrated by high and persistent regional disparities in the unemployment rate. Mobility is hampered by the underdevelopment of the rental housing market, while there is room to enhance the efficiency of public transport to further support commuting."

"Services employ an ever-increasing share of workers in all OECD countries. This trend is likely to continue as it reflects deep structural forces, such as increasing consumption of services with rising incomes and population ageing and the growing role of intangible assets. Services are very diverse, but overall tend to have weaker productivity levels and growth rates than manufacturing. As a result, the shift to services entails a moderate but persistent drag on productivity growth. Still, there are reasons to hope for a pick-up in service productivity in the future, including thanks to new technologies (e.g. digital platforms, artificial intelligence). This concerns both “knowledge intensive” services (e.g. information and communication) and less knowledge intensive ones (e.g. personal transport). Harnessing this productivity potential requires adjusting policies to foster innovation and efficient use of new technologies, enhance competitive forces by reducing information asymmetries, barriers to entry and switching costs, and increase the tradability of services within countries and across borders."

"This paper assesses how the adoption of a range of digital technologies affects firm productivity. It combines cross-country firm-level data on productivity and industry-level data on digital technology adoption in an empirical framework that accounts for firm heterogeneity. The results provide robust evidence that digital adoption in an industry is associated to productivity gains at the firm level. Effects are relatively stronger in manufacturing and routine-intensive activities. They also tend to be stronger for more productive firms and weaker in presence of skill shortages, which may relate to the complementarities between digital technologies and other forms of capital (e.g. skills, organisation, or intangibles). As a result, digital technologies may have contributed to the growing dispersion in productivity performance across firms. Hence, policies to support digital adoption should go hand in hand with creating the conditions to enable the catch-up of lagging firms, notably by easing access to skills."

"This paper presents a range of policies to enhance adoption of digital technologies and firm productivity. It quantifies illustratively the effect of policy changes by combining the results of two recent OECD analyses on the drivers of adoption and their productivity benefits. Increasing access to high-speed internet, upgrading technical and managerial skills and implementing product and labour market reforms to facilitate the reallocation of resources in the economy are found to be the main factors supporting the efficient adoption of a selection of digital technologies. The most productive firms have benefitted relatively more from digitalisation in the past, contributing to a widening productivity gap with less productive firms. Policies should create the conditions for efficient adoption by less productive firms, which would help them to catch up, achieving a double dividend in terms of growth and inclusiveness. Enhancing skills has a key role to play in this area since less productive firms suffer relatively more from skill shortages."

"This paper uses a novel empirical approach to assess if the development of online platforms affects the productivity of service firms. We build a proxy measure of platform use across four industries (hotels, restaurants, taxis and retail trade) and ten OECD countries using internet search data from Google Trends, which we link to firm-level data on productivity in these industries. We find that platform development supports the productivity of the average incumbent service firm and also stimulates labour reallocation towards more productive firms in these industries. This may notably reflect that platforms' user review and rating systems reduce information asymmetries between consumers and service providers, enhancing competition between providers. The effects depend on platform type. “Aggregator” platforms that connect incumbent service providers to consumers tend to push up the productivity of incumbents, while more disruptive platforms that enable new types of providers to compete with them (e.g. home sharing, ride hailing) have on average no significant effect on it. Consistent with this, we find that different platform types affect differently the profits, mark-ups, employment and wages of incumbent service firms. Finally, the productivity gains from platforms are lower when a platform is persistently dominant on its market, suggesting that the contestability of platform markets should be promoted."