Steering Labor Mobility through Innovation

Song Ma, Wenyu Wang and Yufeng Wu
Additional contact information
Song Ma: Yale U
Wenyu Wang: Indiana U
Yufeng Wu: Ohio State U

Working Paper Series from Ohio State University, Charles A. Dice Center for Research in Financial Economics

Abstract: This paper argues that firms proactively use innovation decisions to influence the mobility and human capital accumulation of their workers. We develop a dynamic model in which workers conduct R&D projects, accumulating both general and firm-specific human capital. Firms choose the scope of innovation, influencing the type of human capital workers accumulate during the process. Pursuing more general innovation leads to increased knowledge redeployability for the firm at the cost of more difficult employee retention. We estimate the model using granular innovation production and mobility data of three million inventors. Our model closely matches the observed mobility and innovation specificity over inventors' life cycles. Empirical estimates of the model parameters imply that 24% of observed innovation specificity among U.S. firms is driven by their labor market considerations, which enhances the firm value but lowers the inventors' surplus.

JEL-codes: J24 J63 O31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-cse, nep-ino, nep-ppm and nep-tid
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4678261

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:ecl:ohidic:2023-29

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Ohio State University, Charles A. Dice Center for Research in Financial Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().