Churning of R&D personnel and innovation

Kathrin Müller and Bettina Peters ()

No 10-032, ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research

Abstract: This paper explores the role of R&D worker mobility on innovation performance. As one main novelty, we employ churning as a measure for worker mobility. Churning depicts the number of workers which are replaced by new ones. It is a very informative indicator since a firm may be exposed to simultaneous leave and inflow of R&D workers even if the size of R&D employment remains unchanged. Hence, we can separate the effect of replacement from net change in R&D workforce. Our results from estimating various knowledge production functions suggest an inverse u-shaped relationship. The exchange of R&D personnel fosters innovation through inter-firm knowledge spillovers and improved job-match quality up to certain threshold. The point when costs of churning exceed the benefits is reached faster if the R&D knowledge is non-duplicative.

Keywords: innovation; churning; mobility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C35 O32 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-ino, nep-lab and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:zewdip:10032

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