Vertical Educational Diversity and Innovation Performance

Thomas Bolli (), Ursula Renold () and Martin Woerter
Additional contact information
Thomas Bolli: KOF Swiss Economic Institute, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Ursula Renold: KOF Swiss Economic Institute, ETH Zurich, Switzerland

No 15-395, KOF Working papers from KOF Swiss Economic Institute, ETH Zurich

Abstract: This paper uses panel data of Swiss firms to analyze the impact of education-level diversity in the workforce on innovation performance, addressing endogeneity by exploiting within-firm variation as well as variation in labor supply across regions. We find that vertical educational diversity increases the extensive margin of R&D and product innovation, particularly new product innovation. However, the relationship with process innovation, R&D intensity, and product innovation intensity is insignificant or even negative. These results are in line with the idea that vertical educational diversity enhances the creative moment of the invention phase, while it might affect the commercialization phase negatively due to the dominance of coordination and communication costs relative to the gains in creativity.

Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2015-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-ino, nep-knm and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.3929/ethz-a-010692089 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Vertical educational diversity and innovation performance (2018)
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:kof:wpskof:15-395

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in KOF Working papers from KOF Swiss Economic Institute, ETH Zurich Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().