Worker flows, entry, and productivity in New Zealand’s construction industry

Adam Jaffe and Chappell Chappell

No 290509, Motu Working Papers from Motu Economic and Public Policy Research

Abstract: We use administrative data on the population of New Zealand construction firms from 2001-2012, along with linked data on their employees and working proprietors, to study the relationships among worker flows, entry, and firm productivity. We find that job churn is prevalent in construction, with around 60 percent of firm-worker pairs not existing previously or not existing subsequently. Firms with new employees are more productive than those with no change in workforce, in part because of knowledge flows from other construction firms. In our preferred specification, with firm fixed effects, a standard deviation increase in the productivity of new employees’ previous firms is associated with a 0.6 percent increase in productivity. Entrants are more productive than pre-existing firms. Firms that enter briefly and disappear exhibit high productivity for that brief period, and firms that enter and stay exhibit a persistent productivity advantage that averages about 6 percent, but which grows as experience accumulates. The entry and worker-knowledge-flow phenomena are distinct, in that the entry effect is not explained by employee composition, and non-entrant firms also benefit from worker knowledge flows.

Keywords: Productivity; Analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 53
Date: 2018-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec and nep-eff
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/290509/files/18_02.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:ags:motuwp:290509

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.290509

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Motu Working Papers from Motu Economic and Public Policy Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().