Documents Criscuolo, Chiara 18 results

"We discuss the literature on the importance of entry and exit for raising productivity growth. Using micro data for the UK for a period from 1980 to 2000, we find that the share of productivity growth accounted for by entry and exit has increased considerably: from around 25 per cent in the 1980s to around 50 per cent in the 1990s. We then ask to what extent increased globalization—measured as sectoral import penetration—might have explained this and find effects from both globalization and information and communication technology."

"This paper investigates how firms' occupational structure shapes the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) using matched administrative data on French firms and relying on an instrumental variable Probit model. We identify ICT engineers as the only occupational group with a robust and statistically significant effect on AI adoption. This finding holds for ICT and non-ICT Services sectors, and regardless of whether AI is developed in-house or acquired externally. Our estimates suggest that closing the occupational gap between adopters and non-adopters would require approximately 215,000 additional ICT engineers, and 45,000 for the firms most exposed to AI. The results highlight the critical importance of investing in advanced digital skills to support Technology diffusion the broader diffusion of AI technologies."

This work is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

"Motivated by the on-going interest of policy makers in the sources of job creation, this paper presents results from a new OECD project on the dynamics of employment (DynEmp) based on an innovative methodology using firm-level data (i.e. national business registers or similar sources). It demonstrates that among small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), young firms play a central role in creating jobs, whereas old SMEs tend to destroy jobs. This pattern holds robustly across 17 OECD countries and Brazil, extending recent evidence found in the United States. The paper also shows that young firms are always net job creators throughout the business cycle, even during the financial crisis. During the crisis, entry and post-entry growth by young firms were affected most heavily, although downsizing by old firms was responsible for most job losses. The results also highlight large cross-country differences in the growth potential of young firms, pointing to the role played by national policies in enabling successful firms to create jobs."

"This biennial report continues the joint JRC-OECD analysis of the IP portfolios of the world's top 2 000 R&D investors. The report shows that global R&D and patenting activities are highly concentrated among the world's top 2 000 R&D investors. These are equivalent to 87% of global business R&D expenditures by the private sector and 63% of patent filings across all technologies. There is much less concentration at the commercialisation stage, with only 6% of total trademarks owned by the top R&D investors. The world's top R&D investors are key contributors to global climate-related innovation. They own 70% of global climate change mitigation or adaptation patents and over 10% of global climate-related trademarks, which is larger than their contribution to overall patents and trademarks across all fields. Looking at the potential contribution of the digital revolution to climate-related innovation at the invention stage, 20% of climate-related patents have a digital component (against 33% for patents across all technological fields). Finally, this edition of the report investigates for the first time the gender composition of both the board of directors of the top 2 000 R&D investors, and of their R&D workforce. In general, EU27 companies have on average more gender-balanced boards than the US and the Asian ones, with a women representation of at least 26%. A substantial gender gap is also observed for inventors listed in patent applications, with significant heterogeneity across countries and sectors."

"In this paper, we aim to bring the debate on the global productivity slowdown – which has largely been conducted from a macroeconomic perspective – to a more micro-level. We show that a particularly striking feature of the productivity slowdown is not so much a lower productivity growth at the global frontier, but rather rising labour productivity at the global frontier coupled with an increasing labour productivity divergence between the global frontier and laggard (non-frontier) firms. This productivity divergence remains after controlling for differences in capital deepening and mark-up behaviour, suggesting that divergence in measured multi-factor productivity (MFP) may in fact reflect technological divergence in a broad sense. This divergence could plausibly reflect the potential for structural changes in the global economy – namely digitalisation, globalisation and the rising importance of tacit knowledge – to fuel rapid productivity gains at the global frontier. Yet, aggregate MFP performance was significantly weaker in industries where MFP divergence was more pronounced, suggesting that the divergence observed is not solely driven by frontier firms pushing the boundary outward. We contend that increasing MFP divergence – and the global productivity slowdown more generally – could reflect a slowdown in the diffusion process. This could be a reflection of increasing costs for laggard firms of moving from an economy based on production to one based on ideas. But it could also be symptomatic of rising entry barriers and a decline in the contestability of markets. We find the rise in MFP divergence to be much more extreme in sectors where pro-competitive product market reforms were least extensive, suggesting that policy weaknesses may be stifling diffusion in OECD economies."

"This paper provides new cross-country evidence on the links between national policies and the growth patterns of start-ups. In particular, it compares for the first time the heterogeneous effects of national policies on entrants and incumbents, within the same country, industry, and time period. A number of key facts emerge. First, start-ups in volatile sectors and in sectors that exhibit higher growth dispersion are significantly more exposed to national policies than start-ups in other sectors. Second, start-ups are systematically more exposed than incumbents to the policy environment and national framework conditions. Third, the results suggest that timely bankruptcy procedures and strong contract enforcement are key to establishing a dynamic start-up environment."

" This study has four aims. Firstly, the study presents comparative evidence on the presence of foreign affiliates across OECD countries. Secondly, it reports the relative labour productivity of foreign affiliates across OECD countries. Thirdly, the study quantifies the contribution of foreign affiliates to labour productivity growth in OECD countries using a growth accounting approach. Fourthly, the analysis shows how much of this contribution derives from an increase in the employment share of foreign affiliates and how much from an increase in the productivity of foreign affiliates in the host country. The information is derived by matching three OECD data sources: the STAN database for industrial analysis, the AFA (Activities of Foreign Affiliates) and FATS (Foreign Affiliates in Trade and Services) databases. The study confirms that foreign affiliates are more labour productive than the average domestic firm and shows that this advantage remains after controlling for industrial composition of the foreign affiliates sector. Finally, the analysis shows that foreign affiliates can make an important contribution to labour productivity growth. The contribution is largest in the manufacturing sector. In the services sector and in low-tech manufacturing sectors, the largest component of the contribution of foreign affiliates is associated with the increased employment share of foreign affiliates. In medium- and high-tech sectors, the contribution is mainly driven by strong labour productivity growth of existing foreign affiliates. In the United States the contribution in both the manufacturing and the services sectors is consistently driven by strong labour productivity growth of existing foreign affiliates."

"This report provides new evidence on the increasing dispersion in wages and productivity using novel micro-aggregated firm-level data from 16 countries. First, the report documents an increase in wage and productivity dispersions, for both manufacturing and market services. Second, it shows that these trends are driven by differences within rather than across sectors, and that the increase in dispersion is mainly driven by the bottom of the distribution, while divergence at the top occurs only in the service sector, and only after 2005. Third, it suggests that between-firm wage dispersion is linked to increasing differences between high and low productivity firms. Fourth, it suggests that both globalisation and digitalisation imply higher wage divergence, but strengthen the link between productivity and wage dispersion. Finally, it investigates the impact of minimum wage, employment protection legislation, trade union density, and coordination in wage setting on wage dispersion and its link to productivity dispersion."

"The literature has established two robust stylised facts: (i) the existence of a firm size-wage premium; and (ii) a positive relationship between firm size and productivity. However, the existing evidence is mainly based on manufacturing data only. With manufacturing nowadays accounting for a small share of the economy, whether productivity, size, and wages are closely linked, and how tight this link is across sectors, is still an open question. Using a unique micro-aggregated dataset covering the whole economy in 17 countries over 1994-2012, this paper compares these relationships across sectors. While the size-wage and size-productivity premia are significantly weaker in market services compared to manufacturing, the link between wages and productivity is stronger. The combination of these results suggests that, in a service economy the “size-wage premium” becomes more a “productivity-wage premium”. These results have first-order policy implications for both workers and firms."

"This study proposes a taxonomy of sectors according to the extent to which they have gone digital. The taxonomy accounts for some of the key facets of the digital transformation, and recognises that sectors differ in their development and adoption of the most advanced “digital” technologies, in the human capital needed to embed them in production and in the extent to which digital tools are used to deal with clients and suppliers. The indicators used to classify 36 ISIC revision 4 sectors over the period 2001-15 are: share of ICT tangible and intangible (i.e. software) investment; share of purchases of intermediate ICT goods and services; stock of robots per hundreds of employees; share of ICT specialists in total employment; and the share of turnover from online sales. The study further proposes an overall summary indicator of the digital transformation in sectors which encompasses all the considered dimensions."