Documents Criscuolo, Chiara 17 results

"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 report analyses the demand for positions that require skills needed to develop or work with AI systems across 14 OECD countries between 2019 and 2022. It finds that, despite rapid growth in the demand for AI skills, AI-related online vacancies comprised less than 1% of all job postings and were predominantly found in sectors such as ICT and Professional Services. Skills related to Machine Learning were the most sought after. The US-focused part of the study reveals a consistent demand for socio-emotional, foundational, and technical skills across all AI employers. However, leading firms – those who posted the most AI jobs – exhibited a higher demand for AI professionals combining technical expertise with leadership, innovation, and problem-solving skills, underscoring the importance of these competencies in the AI field."

"This paper analyses employment dynamics across firms during the COVID-19 pandemic and the role of job retention schemes (JRS) in shaping these dynamics. It relies on a novel collection of high-frequency harmonised micro-aggregated statistics, computed using administrative data on employment and wages from electronic payroll records across 12 countries linked to monthly information on policy support during COVID-19, as well as on a new indicator of JRS de-jure generosity. The analysis highlights four key findings: i) the employment adjustment margins varied over time, adjusting mainly through the intensive margin in 2020, while both the intensive and the extensive margins contributed to employment changes in 2021; ii) the reallocation process remained productivity enhancing, although to a lower extent on average compared to 2019; iii) JRS were successful in their purpose of cushioning the effect of the crisis on employment growth and firm survival; iv) JRS support did not distort the productivity-enhancing nature of reallocation."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."