Productivity Effects of Knowledge Transfers through Labour Mobility

Johannes Pöschl () and Neil Foster-McGregor

No 117, FIW Working Paper series from FIW

Abstract: The paper addresses the link between productivity and labour mobility. The hypothesis tested is that technology is transmitted across industries through the movement of skilled workers embodying human capital. The embodied knowledge is then diffused within the new environment creating spillovers and leading to productivity improvements. The empirical analysis is based on household survey and industry-level data for a sample of 12 EU countries covering the years 1995-2005. The estimates document the importance of positive cross-sectoral knowledge spillovers and indicate that labour mobility has considerable beneficial effects on industry productivity. Possible endogeneity problems related to labour mobility are tackled by employing a two stage instrumental variables approach. Moreover we show that the spillover effects vary considerably by technology level of the giving industry. While workers moving away from high and medium-tech industries are found to produce positive productivity effects for the receiving industry, no effect is found for those coming from low-tech industries.

Keywords: Knowledge Spillovers; Labour Mobility; Productivity; Human Capital; Industry Level (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J24 J60 O47 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36
Date: 2013-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff, nep-knm, nep-lab, nep-lma and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.fiw.ac.at/fileadmin/Documents/Publikati ... 17-PoeschlFoster.pdf full text
none

Related works:
Journal Article: Productivity effects of knowledge transfers through labour mobility (2016)
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:wsr:wpaper:y:2013:i:117

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
FIW Project Office Austrian Institute of Economic Research Arsenal Objekt 20 A-1030 Vienna

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in FIW Working Paper series from FIW
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().