EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Technological innovation and the demand for labor by firms in expansion and recession

Javier Ortiz and Vicente Salas Fumás

Economics of Innovation and New Technology, 2020, vol. 29, issue 4, 417-440

Abstract: With firm data from the Spanish Community Innovation Survey (CIS) for the period 2003–2014, we find a positive and significant effect of innovation in the demand for labor when firms introduce product and process innovations in the same time period. The effect of innovation on the demand for labor is countercyclical, higher in the recession, after 2008, than in the expansion, before 2008, but the probability that firms innovate in product and process is counter-cyclical, i.e. lower in the recession. Altogether, the elasticity of the demand for labor to the probability that firms introduce product and process innovations remains stable throughout the sample period, at around 0.035. Innovation contributes to stabilize average employment during the cycle, more so when the innovation is in product, alone or together with process, than when it is only in process. These results are broadly consistent with product and process innovations shifting firms’ demand and production functions upwards, but differentially in expansions (less product market competition) than in contractions (more competition).

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/10438599.2019.1629535 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:ecinnt:v:29:y:2020:i:4:p:417-440

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/GEIN20

DOI: 10.1080/10438599.2019.1629535

Access Statistics for this article

Economics of Innovation and New Technology is currently edited by Professor Cristiano Antonelli

More articles in Economics of Innovation and New Technology from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-20
Handle: RePEc:taf:ecinnt:v:29:y:2020:i:4:p:417-440