Learning by Doing, Worker Turnover, and Productivity Dynamics

Hyowook Chiang

No 593, Econometric Society 2004 Far Eastern Meetings from Econometric Society

Abstract: Recent evidence based on longitudinal firm-level data suggests that within-firm productivity growth explains about 50 percent of total factor productivity growth in the manufacturing sector while net entry effects account for about 30 percent of total factor productivity growth. These two forces may be connected via learning by doing of young businesses. That is, the recent evidence also shows that young businesses that survive exhibit more rapid productivity growth than older incumbents. The idea that learning-by-doing is important and, in particular, important for young businesses is not novel to this paper. What is novel about this paper is that newly developed longitudinal employer-employee matched data are used to characterize and measure the nature of learning. In contrast to the existing literature on learning, this paper shows that learning is not only affected by past output, but also by worker turnover within firms. The basic idea is that firms with high worker turnover will make learning-by-doing more difficult. Using this approach, I estimate that firms with historically lower rates of turnover "learn" faster than those with higher turnover given the same amount of past outp

Keywords: Learning by Doing; Worker Turnover; Productivity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D24 J24 O47 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004-08-11
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.wam.umd.edu/~hyowook/research/lbd20040124.pdf main text (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.wam.umd.edu/~hyowook/research/lbd20040124.pdf [302 Found]--> https://www.grace.umd.edu/~hyowook/research/lbd20040124.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:ecm:feam04:593

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Econometric Society 2004 Far Eastern Meetings from Econometric Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christopher F. Baum ().