The Contribution of Educated Workers to Firms' Efficiency Gains The Key Role of the Proximity to Frontier

Vincent Vandenberghe

No 2017012, LIDAM Discussion Papers IRES from Université catholique de Louvain, Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales (IRES)

Abstract: Vandenbussche et al (2006), Aghion et al. (2009) posit and show that when economies operate close to the technical frontier, their ability to generate efficiency gains rests on the contribution of workers with advanced forms of education (i.e. those who attended tertiary education). The main originality of this empirical paper is to revisit and improve the analysis of that assumption in the context of firms located in advanced economics, assuming that something that has been verified for OECD countries or US states is likely to be observed also at a much more desegregated level. To that purpose, we analyse a rich panel of Belgian firm-level data, covering the 2008-14 period. In the first step, we concentrate on properly estimating each firm’s distance/proximity to frontier. Step 2 consists in regressing each firm's efficiency growth rate on [1] the share of workers by education attainment [2] its (initial) distance/proximity to the frontier and [3] (the main variable of interest here) the interaction between [1] & [2], whose sign provides a direct test of the Vandenbussche/Aghion assumption. The main result of the paper supports the idea that the closer the firms are from the frontier, the more educated workers matter for efficiency gains.

Keywords: Efficiency growth; Highly-educated workers; Frontier Firms; Proximity to frontier (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E24 I20 J24 O30 O40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 23
Date: 2017-08-21
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-eff, nep-ino and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://sites.uclouvain.be/econ/DP/IRES/2017012.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ctl:louvir:2017012

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LIDAM Discussion Papers IRES from Université catholique de Louvain, Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales (IRES) Place Montesquieu 3, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium). Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Virginie LEBLANC ().