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Evaluating Innovation and Labour Market Relationships: The Case of Italy

Luca PIERONI - Fabrizio POMPEI Department of Economics, Finance and Statistics University of Perugia.

ABSTRACT In this paper the link between labour market flexibility and innovation is analysed, paying particular attention to the different technological regimes of economic activities and the different geographical areas of the Italian economy. A dynamic panel data specification is used to assess the endogenous relationship between patents, included as a proxy of the innovation, and job turnover and wages which represent labour market indicators. The results show that higher job turnover only has a significant and negative impact on patent activities in regional sectors of Northern Italy, while a positive and significant impact of blue and white collar wages has been generally found.

Key words: Labour market flexibility, Innovation, Dynamic panel data, Endogeneous relationship J.E.L. : R12; J40; O31

Acknowledgement: We are grateful to both the participants of the Italian Association for the Study of Comparative Economic Systems (AISSEC) Conference, Naples, 27-28 February, 2004, and those of the 94th Applied Econometric Association Conference, Naples, 01-02 June, 2006, for their suggestions. All errors are our own.

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1.

Introduction

Traditionally, most of the economic debate concerning technological progress and employment relied on the classical compensation theory. It currently concentrates on the impact that different compositions of process and product innovations have on labour-saving and make questionable the counter-balancing mechanisms, resulting from prices and new demand, that absorb unemployment (Vivarelli, 1995; Vivarelli and Pianta, 2000; Piva and Vivarelli, 2005). New approaches analysing the same relationship, such as the skill-biased technological changes theory, are concentrated on evaluating the impact of last wave innovations on the wages and skills of the workforce (Bound and Johnson, 1992; Berman et al., 1994; Johnson, 1997, Mortensen and Pissarides, 1999; Mincer, 2003). Within this context, theoretical and empirical results show the magnitude of the shift of the relative demand for skilled labour, yielding a new equilibrium characterized by a higher relative wages and a higher quota of skilled employment. Therefore, wage inequality and the need to relax the firing and hiring restrictions in the labour market have been seen as a direct effect of higher innovation activities. Despite the dominance of investigations dealing with the unidirectional impact of innovations towards the labour market, there are some fields of theoretical investigation where particular market segmentations (Doeringer and Piore 1971; Osterman 1982), or complementarities between investments in innovation activities and the demand for skilled labour (Acemoglu, 1997a; 1997b; 2002), or innovative milieux (Keeble and Wilkinson, 1999; Lawson and Lorenz, 1999) have been recognised as determining an endogenous character of the labour market/innovation relationship. However, very few detailed empirical investigations, both on the direct impact of labour flexibility on the accumulation of skills and innovative performances and on their likely endogeneity, have been performed (Capello, 1999; Bassanini and Ernst, 2002; Michie and Sheehan, 2003). 2

In other terms, the feedback from the effects that employment conditions and the flexibility levels of labour market have on innovation, has not been studied in depth. This appears striking given that the European and Italian economic policy debate has been particularly animated in recent years, both regarding labour market flexibility and productivity questions (Treu, 1992; Bertola and Rogerson, 1997; Costabile and Papagni, 1998; Zimmermann, 2005). The lack of flexibility has often been identified as a determinant of a pathological unemployment rate and has been recognized as hindering investments in innovations. Nonetheless, the possibility that a circular causality is at play between labour flexibility and innovation, reflecting on the long-term innovative performances of the economic systems, has been in great measure neglected. The present paper attempts to take a step forward by analysing labour market flexibility, represented by labour mobility and wages, to determine whether it influenced the innovation activities of Italian industries and regions in the nineties. Firstly, we consider the endogenous character of the labour flexibility/innovation relationship, by means of a dynamic model, paying attention to the likelihood of circular causality. Secondly, the same relationship is assumed to be strongly context-dependent. In other terms, we take into account both the specific technological context at the sectoral level (Malerba and Orsenigo, 1996; 1997) and the different regional development patterns (Cooke et al.,1997; Capello, 1999; Keeble and Wilkinson, 1999; Lawson and Lorenz, 1999). Moreover, with respect to other surveys concerning the Italian case and showing very similar aims (Capello, 1999), our investigation not only takes into account the endogeneity problem but also includes all Italian regions and manufacturing industries1. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. In section 2 we develop the conceptual framework supporting the empirical analysis. Section 3 focuses on the variables implemented in the econometric model and presents some descriptive statistics. Details on the econometric specifications and a brief discussion on the Dynamic Panel Data estimator are reported in

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section 4. Finally, in section 5, the estimated results are discussed, while final considerations are given in section 6.

2.

The conceptual framework of empirical analysis

The question of labour market flexibility has been widely investigated, but many points remain controversial. Thus, most authors recognised that the term “flexibility” can assume different meanings, depending on the context of the political debate or on the theoretical point of view of the analysis. For example, Piore (1986, 2004) highlighted that since the 1980s a different way of interpreting the flexibility of labour has become rooted in North American and European business communities. Other large surveys stressed several dimensions of flexibility according to different schools of economic thought: e.g. institutionalist vs neoclassical theories (Creedy and Whitfield 1988) or post-fordist vs managerialist views (Brewster et al. 1997). Moreover, labour flexibility can be discussed in different ways, depending on the elements of the economic system and on the nexus taken into consideration, e.g. labour flexibility and unemployment, labour flexibility and innovation, labour flexibility and the firm’s performance. In order to provide theoretical support for the current empirical analysis, in the next subsections we limit our survey by using only those conceptual tools that are useful to explore the labour flexibility and innovation nexus, without neglecting the particular views with which this relationship has been implicitely or explicitely treated by some of the main schools of economic thought.

2.1 Labour flexibility and innovation according to the institutionalist view Undoubtely theories of internal and dual labour markets, stemming from an institutionalist view, constituted an important challenge to the wage competition model used by the

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traditional neo-classical school. By studying the level of inter-firm labour mobility, Doeringer and Piore (1971) stressed the presence of local labour markets where low mobility results from the efforts of employers to reduce turnover in order to preserve skill-specificity. These skills are only useful in a small range of jobs and show a high complementarity with other specific resources of the firm. The consequence is that firms draw a distinction between incumbents and otherwise similar workers outside the firm. Therefore, skill-specificity is seen to promote the restriction of the lower job classifications into an internal labour market and higher mobility occurs within the firm rather than between firms. It is worth noticing that in this case also the reverse causal nexus holds: an internal labour market protects the accumulation of skill-specificity and favours incremental innovations within the firm. This early fordist view has been modified because decentralisation of the productive structure occurred in the most developed countries during the 1970s and 1980s. The interpretation of these processes in fact relied on the shift from mass production to flexible specialisation systems (Piore and Sabel 1984; Tolliday and Zeitlin 1986; Lash and Urry 1987). Consequently, the segmentation of the labour market into a primary sector, where a more stable skilled labour force operates, and secondary sector, characterised by unskilled workers, lower wage levels and higher job turnover rates, has also been seen as occurring within large firms and as favouring the de-verticalisation processes (Osterman 1982)2. Focusing on the micro-level, Atkinson (1985a; 1985b; 1986) identified three different dimensions of the flexible firm: a numerical flexibility, which is the ability of firms to change the number of people they employ; functional flexibility, as the ability to vary the amount of labour that firms use, without resorting to the external labour market; wage flexibility, that represents the ability of pay and payment systems to respond to labour market conditions and to reward and encourage improved performance. The dimensions mentioned above also characterize the regional level of the analysis, once the decentralisation process occurs. For example Brusco (1982), have stressed that the

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outsourcing of the secondary sector from large firms has generated local Small and Medium sized Enterprise systems (SMEs). Actually the same author, by outlining the workings of a case study representing the Italian North-East industrial districts model, well highlighted the heterogeneity of the secondary sector where, besides home-workers and other kinds of subcontractors, highly skilled workers operate. Therefore, this secondary labour market sector, mainly made up of small firms, very often shares the primary sector’s advanced technologies, innovative capacities and, at least in periods of expansion, the secondary sector returns flexibility in the use of labour to the entire productive structure. The link between the primary and secondary sector generates flexibility and entrepreneurship that, in turn, produce higher rates of growth. This virtuous cycle pushes up family incomes, so enabling them to increase their education and accumulation of skills. Relying on previous results, the studies realized within institutionalist and evolutionary paradigms throughout the 1990s notably pointed out the role played by labour mobility in SME systems. Supplier/customer relationships, spin-off from universities or other firms, and the inter-firm mobility of workers have been recognised as the main mechanisms for knowledge transmission and learning in innovative milieux (Keeble and Wilkinson 1999). In particular, most innovative activities realized in these regions are based on collective learning, that is, the creation of an increasing base of common knowledge among individuals enabling them to coordinate their actions in the resolution of technological and organizational problems (Lorenz 1996, Lawson and Lorenz 1999, Capello 1999). Given that the sharing of largely tacit knowledge promotes the re-combination of the region’s diverse resources, the mobility of highly skilled personnel in the local labour market guarantees a suitable technological transfer across firms.

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The higher mobility of labour supporting collective learning has also been found to be a crucial determinant in the development of some European High-Tecnology Clusters of recent years (Keeble and Wilkinson 2000; Longhi and Keeble 2000; Camagni and Capello 2000).

2.2 Labour market and innovation in the neo-classical perspective of the last decades There are also neo-classical lines of research worth noting which distinguish themselves from simple wage competition models and focus on job turnover and wage levels from a different point of view. In this context Labour Turnover (Stiglitz, 1974; Arnott and Stiglitz, 1985; Arnott et al., 1988) and Job-Search theories (Mortensen and Pissarides, 1997; 1999) aim to analyse unemployment variability as the result of imbalances between flows into and out of the job market. It is necessary to remark that in the Labour Turnover framework, innovation is only tacitly considered while the focus is on the labour mobility-wage structure. Low wages cause a costly high mobility of labour that, in turn, negatively affects labour costs, productivity and human capital accumulation of workers. On the other hand, if efficiencywage considerations emerge to solve this problem and labour market rules make layoffs prohibitively expensive, labour mobility decreases in the short term, but rises in the long term. Firms cannot lay workers off, go bankrupt and an increase in the unemployment level occurs. In Job-Search theories, the labour market/innovation relationship is explicitly discussed. According to these theories, job security reduces job destruction. The incentive to create new jobs in response to the need to change products and production processes is reduced. For this reason over-restrictive market rules inhibit an efficient reallocation of labour and hinder innovative activities. An extension of the Job-Search models was carried out by Acemoglu (1997a; 1997b). Within this view, when complementarities between workforce skills and technology choice are taken into account (i.e. an economy with endogenous technology choices), a deregulated labour market is no longer the best solution. If the turnover rate increases, the firm does not invest in

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new technology (or R&D) and on-job training for workers, because the additional return on training, or gains stemming from acquired knowledge in R&D activities will benefit the worker who will probably soon leave the firm. On the other hand, if workers do not expect firms to invest in new technology (or R&D), their wages cannot be adequately high and they do not invest in human capital accumulation. Thus, life-time employment relationships are important factors contributing to technological changes. The wage level can play an important role to stimulate innovation as a result of the performance of innovative and highly profitable firms. But it is not difficult to consider the equally important reverse direction of the causality. Thus, there are other branches of literature, within the neo-classical paradigm, underlining that when wages are kept above their market-clearing level, regulative interventions (minimum wages, union power, normative traditions) and efficiency are involved (Shapiro and Stiglitz, 1984; Stiglitz and Greenwald, 1995). The disparate contributions to the signalling/incentive literature have been synthesized within the efficiency wage models (Akerlof and Yellen 1986), which explain why firms find it unprofitable to reduce wages when there is high unemployment. In brief, wage cuts are said to harm productivity and, therefore, while they would reduce total labour costs, they may increase labour costs per efficiency unit. Finally, it must be mentioned that also for according to some evolutionary and istitutionalist views, higher level wages exert a direct and positive effect on the active participation of the workforce in the learning process, enhancing loyalty and commitment, and stimulate practitioners into developing informal relationships, sharing information and accelerating the emergence of tacit knowledge (Kleinknecht, 1998; Antonelli, 1999; Kitson et al., 2000).

2.3 The basic hypothesis supporting empirical analysis The previous discussion leads one to believe that the relationship between labour market flexibility and innovation is not so straightforward and raises at least four questions:

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a) To what extent do higher wage levels improve innovation? b) Is it still possible to find internal labour markets, essentially coinciding within the firm’s boundary, where the skill specificity that supports innovation is protected by low inter-firm mobility? c) Is higher labour inter-firm mobility, characterising the SME contexts and favoured by less labour market regulation, always the result of an effective balance of interests by individual producers (embedding in network relations versus loss of proprietary knowledge) or does it hinder, in some situations, innovative activities? d) Does the existence of complementarieties between highly skilled workers and technological choices of employers somehow force us to take into account the endogenous character of labour flexibility/innovation relationship? Indeed some empirical works have found that the impact of labour market regulation on innovation shows different outcomes and reveals a strong context-dependent influence. For example, Kleinknecht (1998), focusing on the Dutch case, pointed out that the extension of a policy of restricted wage increases to all the economy, negatively affected the improvement of labour productivity and innovation in dynamic and hi-tech sectors. He draws important conclusions, that we will take into account, regarding the limited short-run success of policies concentrated on overly modest wage increases, downward wage flexibility and various other attempts to remove labour market rigidities. In fact, in the long run these schemes discourage productivity growth, product innovation and all other innovative performances of the economic system. Bassanini and Ernst (2002) carried out a comparative survey among OECD countries, where the impact of product and labour market regulations on innovation is highlighted by distinguishing between different technological intensities of industries. Michie and Sheehan (2003), using a survey of UK firms, explicitly investigated firms’ use of various flexible work practices, and the innovative activities of those firms, within the various industrial relation

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systems. Capello (1999) focuses on three Italian high technology milieux by considering the different impact of the labour force turnover on process innovations, product innovations and radical innovations. In the current paper, we address the four questions mentioned above by referring to the whole Italian economy in the 1990s. More precisely, we start from the consideration that both the manner of organizing innovative activities and the geographical contexts are essential when we explore the labour flexibility/innovation relationship. Therefore, the endogenous character of this link will be analysed by distinguishing between the different technological regimes of industries and among the different territorial patterns of development shown by Italian regions. As far as the technological regime of an industry is concerned, Malerba and Orsenigo (1996;1997), relying on empirical works defined it as a combination of technological opportunities, appropriability conditions, knowledge accumulation characteristics and base knowledge. The analysis of the organization of innovative activities led the same authors to identify the classical Schumpeterian sectoral patterns by means of four indicators: i) localisation of innovative activities; ii) size of innovative firms; iii) permanence in the hierarchy of innovators; iv) new entry of innovators. The Schumpeter Mark I pattern (SMI), defined as a creative destruction regime, shows low concentration of innovative activities at the firm level, instability in the hierarchy of innovators and higher new entry of small business in innovation activities. Within this context knowledge spillovers among firms and collective learning are relevant. Therefore the cumulative process regarding the knowledge that supports innovation occurs at the territorial level and not at the firm level. The traditional low-tech branches (food industry; textile, garment and footwear; wood and furniture; non metallic mineral products and metallic products) are highly correlated to this pattern.

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Conversely, Schumpeter Mark II (SMII), defining the creative accumulation regime, is reported in the same empirical analysis as the pattern where the concentration of innovative activities involves large corporations; the latter show permanence at the top of the innovators’ classification and are eventually less threatened by new innovators. The accumulation of knowledge, which is more codified in nature, is supported by R&D investments and basically occurs at the firm level. In this case there is a good correspondance between these sectors and the so-called hi-tech industries (machinery, electrical equipment, television, office machinery, medical components, motor vehicles, transport equipment). In order to enforce our hypothesis, we include as a unit of analysis the Regional Innovation System (RIS) concept. The RIS is developed within the theoretical context of the National System of Innovation (NIS), where parallel technological changes in work organization and production are accompanied by cultural changes or changes in habits and routines (Lundvall, 1993; Cooke et al.,1997; Asheim and Coenen, 2005). The shift from NIS to RIS concerns the extent of the systemic character of the geographical and administrative area considered, as well as the territorial range of the knowledge spillover. If the tacit character of knowledge is recognized as playing a key role in innovation, the latter cannot be easily shared and applied outside its territory of generation (Amin and Wilkinson, 1999; Antonelli, 2005). This geographical stickiness of knowledge diffusion and learning process is only one of the main characteristics of RIS. Within it, firms, other economic agents and local institutions co-evolve and contribute to shape a specific political-administrative body. Thus, the RIS becomes an institutional repository of a certain negotiated, evolving, social order that establishes routines, norms and values by which actors may come to trust each other collectively (Cooke et al.,1997). Different institutional settings will be likely to give rise to distinctive conventions or forms of collective social order, leading to the establishment of different kinds of organization of innovative activities, but also favouring different micro-constitutional regulations that affect the labour market.

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Within this conceptual framework, the hypothesis regarding the endogenous relationship between numerical flexibility (or labour mobility) and innovative activity, can be differentiated. The numerical flexibility of the labour market can affect the innovative activities of industries and/or of regions in different ways. In hi-tech industries, where most of the science based and scale intensive sectors are included, a SMII pattern structuring the innovative activities is probably working. In this case it is expected that lower job turnover does not hinder the generation of innovation and/or its adoption. Knowledge accumulation at the firm level generates a strong incentive to use the firm’s internal labour market (functional flexibility). The tenure of the workforce allows not only a simple “learning by doing” process within the firm, but also guarantees a possible coevolution among tangible assets, the firm’s core competences and the workers’ skills3. On the other hand, high turnover rates provide support for the flow of knowledge across small firms within traditional sectors (low R&D intensity industries), where a creative destruction pattern (SMI) is probably operating. The different systems of governance acting at the regional level and stemming from the evolution of different socio-economical development patterns (Papagni, 1995; Cooke et al., 1997) could also affect the joint behaviour of labour flexibility and innovative activities. For example, aside from the technological regimes of a particular industry, higher labour flexibility could exert a different impact in Southern Italian regions, where the problem of the adjustement of wages and mobility of labour is deemed to be more severe with respect to the North of Italy (Faini, 1997). These arguments provide a theoretical framework to carry out an empirical analysis where some aspects of labour flexibility and innovative activities are detected.

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3. Data sources and variables The empirical results of the relationship between labour market indicators and innovation that will be presented in the following section concern the manufacturing sectors of Italian industry over the period 1990-19964. The regional level is taken into account by means of NUTS 2 statistical units. As far as the variables are concerned, we chose patent per capita as dependent variable. It describes innovative activities that have occurred within a specific regional sector of industry. Patents are a measure of innovative output and are quite “popular” among innovation scholars, even though they are not inconvenience free (Malerba and Orsenigo, 2000; Jacobsson and Philipson, 1996; Griliches, 1990). For example, the propensity to patent can vary across sectors and products (or production processess), according to institutional and structural characteristics concerning the appropriability of innovations (Malerba and Torrisi, 2000). These characteristics contribute to making the specific technological regime of the sectors, but at the same time, could severely bias the relationships to investigate. However, it is worth noting that with respect to other indicators, such as R&D expenditures, patents often account for informal technological activity, evaluating the amount of innovative activity of medium and small firms (Malerba and Torrisi, 2000; Ferrari et al., 2002). Moreover, the patent data used in the present analysis stem from the CRENOS databank and refer to European Patent Office (EPO) applications. This indicator should be particularly effective in taking into account potentially high remunerative innovations, which for this reason are patented abroad (Paci and Usai, 2000). Finally, these patent data, initially classified by means of the International Patent Classifications (IPC)5, have been converted to the manufacturing industry, by means of the Yale Technology Concordance, in order to obtain coherent data with the ATECO91 classification (Paci and Usai, 2000). As far as labour mobility (or numerical flexibility) is concerned, we chose the gross job turnover rate. Actually, there is little agreement on using gross job turnover (or job

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reallocation) as a proxy for numerical flexibility, i.e. less hiring and firing restrictions (Bertola and Rogerson, 1997; Contini et al., 1996; Boeri, 1996; 1999). In comparative analyses between European countries and the US, both Bertola and Rogerson (1997) and Boeri (1999) criticize the use of turnover rate to prove the negligible differences found in flexibility terms. Conversely, they claim that high wage compression (coming from collective bargaining) and high rigidity, regarding hiring and firing in the workforce, produce high European and Italian turnover rates without the presence of real labour market flexibility. We try to take into account this objection by introducing the wage levels into the model as explanatory variables. Job turnover also depends on the business cycle (Schivardi 1998). We have taken into account the overall impact of the business cycle upon innovation/labour market relationships by introducing temporal dummies in the econometric specification. In line with the aforementioned literature, we refer to gross job turnover as the sum of job creation and job destruction that has occurred at the firm level and has been measured by means of surveys carried out by the National Institution of Social Security (NISS), that identifies the movement of employment positions across firms6. More precisely, the average job creation occurring in the regional sector is

Ci, j =

∑ (E

f ,i , j ,t

− E f ,i , j ,t −1 )

f

( N i , j ,t + N i , j ,t −1 ) / 2

(1)

where E f ,i , j ,t − E f ,i , j ,t −1 is the positive difference between jobs registered in firm f, belonging to region j and sector i, over the yearly period (t and t-1);

( N i , j ,t + N i , j ,t −1 ) / 2 is the average number of firms belonging to region j and sector i, in which the growth of jobs occurred. In the same way, the average job destruction of the regional sector is

Di , j =

∑E

f ,i , j ,t

− E f ,i , j ,t −1

f

( N i , j ,t + N i , j ,t −1 ) / 2

(2)

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where E f ,i , j ,t − E f ,i , j ,t −1 is the negative difference, taken in absolute value, between jobs registered in firm f, belonging to region j and sector i, over the yearly period (t and t-1). Thus, the average gross job turnover in region j and sector i is simply GJTi , j = C i , j + Di , j

(3)

Also wage levels have been drawn from the NISS databank. The breakdown to sectoral and regional level provides yearly average gross real wages7. The NISS databank allows us to differentiate between the wages of blue and white collars. All manual labour is included in blue collars, whereas employees in administrative and clerical positions, technicians, cadres and executives are considered white collars. The simple distinction in these two categories of workers, accompanied by lack of more detailed data, is very often used as a proxy of respectively unskilled and skilled labour (Piva et al., 2005). In our case the information about wage levels can be used as a proxy for skill levels within the blue collar and white collar groups. Therefore, since the white collar category includes researchers and other R&D personnel, we can assess whether the efficiency wage effect on patent activities is only concentrated in this worker group or, conversely, it involves also high-skilled manual workers. In order to differentiate the territorial context corresponding to different models of industrialization we use, as interaction dummies, the classical five geographical macro-areas (North-West, North-East, Centre, South and the Islands). As far as the technological context is concerned, we group 10 manufacturing sectors according to OECD classification, which is used to identify hi-tech/low-tech industries (Hatzichrnoglou, 1997)8. This method takes into account both the level of technology specific to the sector (measured by the ratio of R&D expenditure to value added) and the technology embodied in purchases of intermediate and capital goods. It also corresponds to the Italian classification of the R&D intensity reported by ISTAT (2001) in the Community Innovation Survey. 15

It is worth noting that this R&D intensity classification of industries is not trouble-free. The first limitation concerns the role played by research in the innovation: of course R&D is an important determinant but it is not the only one, e.g. licences, strategic cooperation between companies, informal learning and collective learning are other important sources. Moreover, in the sectoral approach, R&D intensity can be skewed because all research in each sector is attributed to the principal activity of the firms making up the sector9. Finally, we must keep in mind that in our case OECD classification of sectors is only an unrefined proxy of the technological regimes discussed in the previous section. In fact, there is not perfect correspondence between R&D intensity classification (hi-tech/low-tech) and Schumpeterian patterns classification (SMI and SMII) provided by Malerba and Orsenigo (1996) 10. Nevertheless, the need to enforce our hypothesis on the influence of technological context with assumptions concerning the innovative behaviour of enterpreuners, led us to deem positively the trade-off between this necessity and the risk of producing an analysis that was too biased. The size of the sample sums up to 1,400 observations (20 regions NUTS 2 times 10 sectors times 7 years). In Table 1 some descriptive statistics on patents and labour market indicators

can be observed. More precisely, the reported data summarize information in the profile of industries, taking into account summary statistics for regions and years. As far as the patent activities are concerned, we standardised the number of patent applications with respect to the population. In any case, the whole absolute number of Italian patent applications changed from 2,237 in 1990 to 2,069 in 1996, and the average value in those seven years was 2,212. The standardised values of patent applications reported by sector in Table 1 show an overall higher inter-industry variability and provides suggestions for both different appropriability conditions and knowledge accumulation characteristics. The level of patent activities in some low-tech industries is not completely negligible: for example, 3.18 patents per million inhabitants in the wood and furniture sector, and 3.27 in the

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metal products sector are levels comparable with a high-tech sector such as that of motor vehicles (3.21). Indeed, during the nineties, there were four mature sectors (wood-furniture, textile, non metallic mineral products and metal products) in which Italy showed international specialisation in terms of patent demand (Ferrari et al., 2002). There are also economic activities where the firms’ territorial location in industrial districts plays a key role. Taking into account this stylized fact, we carried out an analysis restricted to these four sectors trying to evaluate the influence of industrial districts in the innovation-labour market relationship.

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Table 1 - Summary statistics by industry (average 1990-1996) Patents per million Inhabitants Food, beverages and tabacco Textile products, Wear industry, Leather industry; Luggage, handbags and footwear Wood, Forniture and other manufacturing Paper, printing and publishing Coke and refined petroleum products, Chemical products and synthetic fibres, Plastic products Non metallic mineral products Fabricated and structural metal products Machinery, electrical equipment, television, office machinery, Medical components and Instruments for measuring Motor vehicles, Transport equipment Building

Turnover

Sum 0.36

Dvst 0.03

Min 0.00

Max 0.21

Mean 4.45

Dvst 0.70

Min 3.49

Max 6.92

1.24

0.10

0.00

0.52

5.61

0.90

3.48

9.96

3.18

0.17

0.00

0.61

4.76

1.94

3.41

25.13

0.62

0.04

0.00

0.19

4.51

0.70

2.53

6.31

11.03

0.66

0.00

3.10

7.29

2.12

4.47

14.52

0.68

0.04

0.00

0.32

5.41

1.04

3.58

10.15

3.27

0.18

0.00

0.60

5.75

1.47

3.94

11.71

32.15

1.74

0.00

6.27

6.35

1.51

3.75

13.79

3.21

0.25

0.00

1.38

14.97

17.92

2.00

121.67

0.12

0.01

0.00

0.04

5.33

0.84

3.55

7.52

Blue collar wages

White collar wages

Mean 28506

Dvst 2890

Min 22720

Max 34663

Mean 35011

Dvst 5231

Min 25088

Max 47479

23240

2271

18959

28060

27767

6243

16176

41131

24757

2317

19751

29143

30604

3873

22116

38461

Paper, printing and publishing Coke and refined petroleum products, Chemical products and synthetic fibres, Plastic products

27375

3113

21509

36566

32078

5036

19809

44581

24964

2652

15832

30302

32534

4230

24601

46942

Non metallic mineral products Fabricated and structural metal products Machinery, electrical equipment, television, office machinery, Medical components and Instruments for measuring Motor vehicles, Transport equipment

27804

2738

22059

34099

34027

4581

24636

47990

28005

3155

22324

34485

33788

5701

23314

46046

25421

3085

19007

34004

32306

4508

23422

45972

26771

3333

12896

33657

30915

8248

7829

45987

Building

30916

2172

25570

35019

35147

2978

28153

42635

Food, beverages and tabacco Textile products, Wear industry, Leather industry; Luggage, handbags and footwear Wood, Forniture and other manufacturing

Concerning labour market indicators, higher average turnover rates were found in hi-tech industries and they were probably the outcome of the severe reorganization processes that took place in these industries in those years. These processes were accompanied by high standard deviation, signalling strong differences among regions.

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It is worth noting that higher wage levels, mainly within the blue collar group, did not occur in the hi-tech sectors, although it did in some low-tech ones. Finally, the geographical concentration reported in empirical studies: about 56% of the demands for patents are by firms situated in the Northern Italy (Ferrari et al., 2002). This fact underlines the importance of traditional historical factors that concern different models of industrialization.

4 Models and Estimations

The hypothesis that innovation activities are influenced by the wages or labour mobility indicators has been widely supported by other micro-econometric works (Chennells and Van Reenen, 1997; Flaig and Stadler, 1994; Mohnen et al.,1986). In this work a dynamic panel data has been carried out in order to estimate the aforementioned relationship and, simultaneously, to test the persistent role of the firm’s behaviour in innovation. The estimation strategy uses a two-way static panel data approach as a first step. In the formal way, the static panel data specification takes the following structure: y i ,t = x i' ,t β + μ i ,t

(4)

where yi ,t is the dependent variable measuring the innovation activity, xi' ,t is the 1 ×K vector of explanatory variables and β is a K × 1 vector of parameters. It is assumed that the error μ i,t follows a two-way error component model:

μ i , t = μ i + λ t + ν i ,t

(5)

where ν i ,t − IID ( 0, σ v2 ) In particular μi denotes the individual-specific residual differing across sectors, while λt yearperiod effects is assumed to be fixed parameters estimated as coefficients of time dummies for 19

each year in the sample. This can be justified by Italian macroeconomic cyclical fluctuations concerning the down-turn in the 1990-1996 period. As recalled above, to measure the relationships between innovation activity and labour market indicators, two facts should be considered. Firstly, innovation processes are generally characterized by cumulative effects; thus, it is interesting to specify and test the existence of persistent behaviours in the innovation process by a dynamic econometric model. Secondly, the innovation process depends on some relevant explicative proxies of the labour market that are not strictly exogenous, such that the unidirectional causality relationship could be questionable. Arellano and Bond (1991) gave an answer to the first problem by developing a difference GMM estimator that treats model (4) as a system of dynamic equations, one for each time period, in which the equations differ only in their instruments, moment condition sets and endogeneity problems. The following equation describes the dynamic specification: Δ y i ,t = ϑ ( y i ,t −1 − y i ,t − 2 ) + ( x i' ,t − x i' ,t −1 ) β + (ν i ,t − ν i ,t −1 )

(6)

Since y i ,t is a function of μ i , the lagged dependent variable y i ,t −1 is also a function of μ i . Hence, y i ,t −1 , a right-hand regressor in (6), is correlated with the error term, leading the OLS estimator to be biased and inconsistent. Moreover, the fixed effect estimator is biased and potentially inconsistent even if ν i,t is serially uncorrelated, since y i ,t −1 is correlated with residuals (Baltagi, 2001). Finally, the transformed equation (6) uses instrumental variables to estimate parameters11 in a GMM framework, in order to obtain consistent estimates if there is no second order serial correlation among errors. In particular, the assumption that the idiosyncratic error term in equation levels is not autocorrelated has two testable implications in the first-differenced equation: disturbances will exhibit negative and significant first-order serial correlations and zero second- or higher -order serial correlations.

20

In the Arellano-Bond estimator, Sargan’s test for over-identifying restrictions and a robust version of the first step of the Arellano-Bond estimation are included to verify the adequacy of the model specification and the robustness of estimated parameters. The benchmark specification used to estimate the dynamic relationship between innovation activity and the labour market, and written for simplicity in levels, is: y i ,t = y i ,t −1θ + x i' ,t β + μ i ,t

(7)

where μi,t follows, as in equation (5), a two-way error component model. Again, μ i denotes the individual-specific residual. A sector with a major propensity to patent is likely to have larger innovations year after year so that we can expect to have a large μ i . The variable yi ,t denotes the value of innovation activity at time t (with t = 0, . . . , 7), belonging to the sectoral group i12. According to the conceptual framework explained in section 2.3, we expect to find statistically significant relationships among explanatory variables of job turnover and wage levels in the innovation activity. As far as turnover is concerned, the explorative nature of the analysis leads us to suppose that an overall negative sign could support the predictions of internal labour market theory and the insights of Acemoglu’s model (1997a), in which the high mobility of labour hinders respectively the accumulation of skills within firms, but also the innovation investments of firms and human capital investments of workers before hiring. Conversely, if the result does not appear statistically significant, a technological or geographical differentiation is needed in order to explore the same hypotheses in different contexts. With a technological regime differentiation, we expect that a higher turnover rate affects the innovative activity of the SMII technological regime negatively, given that knowledge and competences are accumulated at the firm level and firms benefit from the tenure of the workforce. The opposite should happen in the SMI regime (proxied by low-tech sectors), where the creative destruction Schumpeterian pattern holds. 21

After a geographical differentiation, we expect the prediction of Acemoglu’s model and the internal labour market theory to be confirmed in the macro-area, where both innovative activities and hi-tech industries are more concentrated, that is in Northern of Italy (Ferrari et al. 2002).

According to efficiency wages theory and to Kleinknecth’s suggestions (1998), wage levels are expected to have positive and significant parameter signs. The explanatory variables on the right hand side of (7), also include one immediate lag of the value of the innovation activity. Since the data are a collection of sectoral information, dynamic components control cumulative effects of innovation activities within regional sectors. In this case, we do not have an a priori idea concerning the expected sign of these effects. The assumption of strict exogeneity of labour flexibility variables is not assertable (see par.2), since the variables could be predetermined or endogeneous, leading to a misspecification of the true relationship between labour market indicators and innovation. For this reason, in order to obtain the best rationale for data, we specify wage levels (both for white and blue collars) as a predetermined variable, including the possibility that the unforecastable errors in the innovation activity (at time t) might affect future changes in wage levels. Moreover, the possibility of a causal relationship between innovations and job turnover, is questionable if we consider an economy with endogenous technology choice. In the empirical part endogenous behaviours of the job turnover is assessed, non-rejecting specifications that depicts the circular causality. From an econometric point of view, we remark that lagged levels of endogenous variables are available to serve as instruments, while the different characterization of the job turnover and wage levels as endogenous and predetermined variables, respectively, reduce the likely multicollinearity when the same labour market indicators are considered “exogenous”.

22

Summing up, the specification in equation (7) is used as a maintained hypothesis with the job turnover variable included as an endogenous variable and wage levels as a predetermined variable, also when we distinguish between hi-tech from low-tech technological intensity levels and macro-geographical areas. Finally, to evaluate different impacts on innovations when the statistical parameters of labour market indicators are not significant, interaction dummies as well as restricted samples are included, aiming to specify restricted hypothesis over the impact of labour flexibility indicators.

5. Results

The static panel data estimation of specification (4) confirms the statistical significance of the time-dummy parameters, stressing the need for testing dynamic panel data

13

. Indeed, as

previously mentioned, problems concerning the statistical serial correlation as well as the presence of endogeneity among labour market indicators and innovation activity could be solved simultaneously by taking into account models specified dynamically. The estimation of the baseline specification of equation (7) by the Arellano and Bond estimator (1991) is shown in Table 2.

23

Table 2 – Estimation of baseline specifications Dependent Variable: Patents Patents (t-1) Turnover Blue collars wages

(1)

(2)

-0.1828

-0.1944

(-1.18)

(-1.21)

0.0007

0.0008

(0.61)

(0.72)

0.0161 (2.42)

White collar wages

0.0004 (2.41)

Time Dummy 1993 Time Dummy 1994 Time Dummy 1995

-0.0418

-0.0427

(-2.80)

(-2.91)

-0.0494

-0.0665

(-1.78)

(-2.40)

-0.0601

-0.0799

(-1.43)

(-1.93)

-0.1038

-0.1255

(-1.93)

(-2.38)

0.0066

0.0177

(0.47)

(1.50)

Arellano Bond test Ho: nonautocorrelation (first order)

z=-2.09 (0.036)

z=-1.89 (0.059)

Arellano Bond test Ho: nonautocorrelation (second order)

z=-1.03 (0.304)

z=-1.10 (0.271)

Sargan test (Prob>χ2)

(0.6009)

(0.5432)

Time Dummy 1996 Constant

z value in brackets

The two columns report separate estimated results of different groups of workers, blue and white collar respectively, using a mix of statistics for one-step and two-step procedures and controlling for heteroscedasticity in data. In particular, the two-step Arellano-Bond estimator is implemented to obtain consistence of the Sargan test since this test is over-rejected in a onestep framework, while one-step estimations, corrected for heteroschedasticity, are used for inference on the coefficients. The estimated parameters in column 1 of Table 2 suggest that only blue collar wages have a meaningful impact on patent performances, taken at the regional level. More precisely, the higher wages of blue collars seem to improve innovative activities, whereas neither job

24

turnover nor the cumulative effect of technology (the lagged dependent variable) play a role in this general specification. In the second column, where we replace blue collar wage levels with the white collar ones, the same result holds; we remark that the positive impact on innovative activities of the latter is slightly less stressed. Moreover, the significant influence of temporal dummies, with a negative sign, underlines the role played by cyclical fluctuations. Probably the downturn period linked with the sample that has characterized the Italian business cycle, negatively affected R&D investment levels that, in turn, discouraged patent activities14. The significant inference of the dynamic specification is supported by the p-value of the Sargan test (0.60 and 0.54 respectively), non-rejecting the included instruments. Confirming the validity of the dynamic panel data specification, the first-order no-autocorrelation is rejected at the usual five percent level, while a second or higher autocorrelation order is rejected. An interaction dummy has been included in the model in Table 3, in order to test the sensitivity of job turnover to the geographical differentiation.

25

Table 3 - Estimation by territorial differentiation

(3) (1)

(2)

Sub sample North-West and North-East

-0.1833

-0.1954

-0.0486

(-1.19)

(-1.22)

(-0.43)

Turnover

0.0002

0.0022

-0.0029

(0.24)

(0.85)

Blue collars wages

0.0172

Dependent Variable: Patents Patents (t-1)

(2.48)

White collar wages

(-1.94)

0.0435 (2.89)

0.0051 (2.84)

NorthWest*turnover

-0.0021

-0.0036

(-2.46)

-(1.42)

-0.0020

-0.0037

(-2.17)

(-1.37)

0.0349

0.0025

(0.36)

(0.25)

0.000001

-0.0034

(0.00)

-(1.11)

-0.0425

-0.0438

-0.0713

(-2.79)

(-2.94)

(-2.32)

-0.0466

-0.0649

-0.0980

(-1.69)

(-2.36)

(-1.57)

-0.0601

-0.0812

-0.1075

(-1.43)

(-1.96)

(-1.12)

Time Dummy 1996

-0.1032

-0.1253

-0.2482

(-1.90)

(-2.36)

(-2.02)

Constant

0.0056

0.0169

-0.0012

(0.40)

(1.44)

(-0.04)

Arellano Bond test Ho: nonautocorrelation (first order) Arellano Bond test Ho: nonautocorrelation (second order)

z=-2.07 (0.038) z=-1.07 (0.285)

z=-1.85 (0.064) z=-1.15 (0.248)

z=-2.37 (0.018) z=-1.27 (0.202)

Sargan test (Prob>χ2)

(0.6194)

(0.6008)

(0.2222)

NorthEast*turnover Centre*turnover South*turnover Time Dummy 1993 Time Dummy 1994 Time Dummy 1995

z value in brackets

Once again, both the first and second autocorrelation tests are coherent with a dynamic specification of the panel data in each equation reported below, as well as with Sargan tests. In first column of Table 3, where the specification includes blue collar wages as the predetermined variable, job turnover exerts a significant and negative impact in the North26

West and North-East of the country. Conversely, the same geographical interaction dummies lack statistical significance when we replace white collar wages with the blue collar ones (column 2). The significance of the results obtained for parameters in the North-West and North-East regions is increased by the estimation of the equation in column 3 with a sample restricted to these areas. As expected, the conditional estimation shows a negative and statistically significant parameter for job turnover, while the robustness of the blue collars’ parameter is remarkable with respect to the unconditional estimation of column 1 (column 3). As mentioned in section 3, the patent demand is mainly localized in these areas. Therefore, this finding is not negligible and provides support for insights stemming from internal labour markets theory and more recent views summarized in Acemoglu (1997a), in which higher inter-firm mobility increases hiring costs, while uncertainty about the tenure of job relations hinders accumulation of specific skills by firms and negatively affects innovation activities. It is also worth remarking on the crucial role played by higher blue collar wages: patent activities benefit more from informal knowledge accumulation favoured by incentive effects operating upon the skilled manual labour force. The impact of job turnover on innovation activities is not clarified by the technological differentiation of industries (Table 4).

27

Table 4 - Estimation by technological intensity of industries

Hi-Tech sectors

Dependent Variable: Patents Patents (t-1) Turnover Blue collars wages

Low-Tech sectors

(1)

(2)

(3)

(4)

-0.8761

-0.1250

-0.097

-0.1167

(-0.65)

(-0.83)

(-1.08)

(-1.39)

-0.0001

0.0006

-0.0021

-0.0004

(-0.10)

(0.58)

(-0.45)

(-0.11)

0.0232

0.0123

(2.51)

(1.59)

White collar wages

0.0004

0.0003

(1.18)

(2.19)

-0.1482

-0.1320

-0.0086

-0.0115

(-2.65)

(-2.60)

(-1.12)

(-1.71)

-0.1779

-0.2001

-0.0028

-0.1506

(-1.96)

(-2.17)

(-0.27)

(-1.75)

-0.2561

-0.2718

0.0061

-0.0093

(-1.89)

(-1.98)

(0.39)

(-0.85)

-0.4006

-0.4128

-0.0019

-0.0189

(-2.34)

(-2.43)

(-0.09)

(-1.19)

0.06413

0.0766

-0.0114

-0.0026

(1.77)

(2.12)

(-1.08)

(-0.57)

Arellano Bond test Ho: nonautocorrelation (first order)

z=-2.57 (0.010)

z=-2.20 (0.028)

z=-3.04 (0.002)

z=-3.23 (0.001)

Arellano Bond test Ho: nonautocorrelation (second order)

z=-0.64 (0.521)

z=-0.79 (0.428)

z=-1.28 (0.199)

z=-1.43 (0.152)

Sargan test (Prob>χ2)

(0.2354)

(0.4070)

(0.0785)

(0.5179)

Time Dummy 1993 Time Dummy 1994 Time Dummy 1995 Time Dummy 1996 Constant

z value in brackets

The remarkable outcome of these estimations is the different behaviour of the wages of each category of workers. In hi-tech industries, only the blue collar wage levels influence innovative activities, acting as a sort of binding factor (column 2). Probably in this context the problem was not the lack of research, but the following set-up of the product or process to patent, carried out by qualified blue collars. Conversely, in low-tech sectors the pecuniary incentive for white collars was the real binding factor (column 4), as signalled by the significance of the positive coefficient of this category. Statistically, almost all specification tests are significant. Only in low-tech industries, where blue collar wages are considered as the predetermined variable (column 3), could the Sargan test be questionable (p-

28

value=0.0785). However, since the p-value is greater than the usual critical value we accept valid instruments in the estimation. It must be remarked at this stage, that the estimated parameters concerning the persistence and cumulative character of patent activity levels is not significant in all specifications. On the one hand, this could mean that a general difficulty to systematically make innovations both at the regional and sectoral level exists, but, on the other hand, the same result could simply indicate that there was only an occasional propensity to patent radical innovations that randomly occurred in the Italian productive systems in the nineties. The last estimation concerns four mature sectors (textile, wood and furniture, non metallic mineral products and metal products) quoted both for their relevant contributions to technological specialisation in patent terms and for their plentiful supply of qualified workers (Ferrari et al., 2002). The patent stocks and flows obtained in these branches have been relevant in Italy compared with other OECD countries and have contributed to the technological specialisation in low-tech sectors. Within this context, we have explored labour market-innovation relationships differentiating between the presence (or absence) of industrial districts in at least one of the four sectors, taken at the regional level. The results are illustrated in Table 5. Firstly, we can observe that job turnover is neither sensitive to particular low-tech sectors nor significant to district effects, as shown by the non-significant values of the respective estimated coefficients. Moreover, in the sample characterized by regions that include industrial districts (column 2), it is worth noting the negative sign of the lagged innovation variable, as well as the positive impact of white collar wages which are both statistically significant. According to the previous result concerning the estimations for lowtech sectors, only the latter exert a positive impact on patents. However, the parameter size indicates that white collar wages play a more important role in the industrial districts relative with the aforementioned four sectors as compared to the whole low-tech sector group.

29

Table 5 - Low-tech sectors that displayed patents specialisations Regions with districts

Dependent Variable: Patents Patents (t-1) Turnover

(1)

(2)

(3)

(4)

-0.1282

-0.2091

-0.1625

-0.1294

(-1.72)

(-2.59)

(-1.33)

(-0.98)

-0.0054

-0.0028

-0.0013

0.0013

(-0.33)

(1.15)

(0.97)

(-0.53)

Blue collars wages

-0.0004

0.0001

(-0.38)

(0.34)

White collar wages Time Dummy 1993 Time Dummy 1994 Time Dummy 1995 Time Dummy 1996 Constant Arellano Bond test Ho: nonautocorrelation (first order) Arellano Bond test Ho: nonautocorrelation (second order)

Sargan test (Prob>χ2)

Regions without districts

0.0006

0.0001

(2.42)

(0.50)

-0.0310

-0.0312

0.1172

0.0116

(-2.00)

(-2.10)

(1.43)

(1.33)

-0.0103

-0.0456

0.0056

0.0046

(-0.43)

(-2.25)

(0.60)

(0.48)

0.0026

-0.0304

-0.0007

-0.0015

(-0.09)

(-1.21)

(-0.06)

(-0.11)

-0.1592

-0.0457

-0.0015

-0.0022

(-0.41)

(-1.24)

(-0.08)

(-0.11)

0.0089

-0.0873

0.00002

-0.0005

(0.62) z=-2.90 (0.004)

(-0.88) z=-2.50 (0.012)

z=-1.74 (0.081)

z=-1.57 (0.116)

(0.00) z=-1.82 (0.068) z=-0.01 (0.991)

(0.10) z=-1.78 (0.074) z=0.19 (0.849)

(0.722)

(0.625)

(0.978)

(0.985)

z value in brackets

Finally, the negative impact of lagged dependent variable highlights that patent activities follow a cycle within the industrial districts of “Made in Italy”. In this sectoral and geographical context, it is known that patent activities depend on the skills of a few firms or in some cases, only to one. Thus, since the same leaders could be the producers of patents, their flow follows the periodicity of research efforts and patent achievement within each industrial district, so that this behaviour does not spread over the local productive systems and an accumulation process does not occur.

30

6. Conclusions

In this paper, we have investigated the links between labour market flexibility and the innovative activities of the Italian economy, from both the point of view of the technological context and the geographical one. According to the theoretical literature that stresses the importance of complementarities between technological choices of entrepreneurs and human capital investments of workers and more generally recognizes a circularity in the causal nexus, we have tested dynamic specifications in order to account for the likely endogeneity of labour market indicators with innovation. Despite the fact that we undoubtely faced difficulties in dealing with variables that were not inconvenience-free, some findings are worth noting at least to open the way to further investigations. In almost all specifications, both blue and white collar wage levels have shown a positive impact on patent activities. This means that where efficiency wages considerations emerge and a distribution of wealth policy favours wage increases, we find innovative activities to be more intensive. Therefore, in the Italian economy of the nineties, strategies, that stimulated labour of better quality and incentives, that improved collaboration of personnel within firms could result in successful innovative performances. On the contrary, the gross job turnover, taken as indicator of labour market mobility, has not shown an overall statistical significance. Nonetheless, the results obtained through the geographic differentiation are not negligible: in regions where patent activity is more significant (the North-West and North-East of the Italy), labour mobility exerts a negative impact on innovation. Undoubtely this finding needs to be more thoroughly investigated. At this stage we can only conjecture that intensive patent activity could occur within internal labour markets coinciding with large and medium firms of Northern Italy, where lower inter-firm mobility protects the

31

accumulation of firm-specific skills and/or favours the simultaneous choice of technology investments by employers and human capital investments by workers. Finally, a general result concerns the non-significant impact of the past patent activities on the present ones. This lack of persistence indicates that Italian firms probably use European patents only to protect radical innovations that randomly occur in the regional and sectoral systems of production.

32

Footnotes 1

In Capello’s paper (1999) a very refined proxy for innovative activity and labour mobility has been used. On the other hand, the limit of this empirical analysis is that it is restricted to a sample of three Italian High-Tech clusters located only in three different provinces.

2

The institutionalist literature did not clearly define the differences between the internal labour market theory (internal vs. external labour markets) and the dual labour market one (primary vs. secondary labour markets). Both cases mainly focused on the macro-economic level, even though the dual labour market view is better fit to analyse labour segmentation in the primary and secondary sector that occurs within firms and allows de-verticalisation processes (Guidetti, 1995).

3

The crucial role played by the co-evolution of tangibile (capital, natural resources, etc.) and intangible (competencies, reputation, etc.) resources within corporations is examined within the resource-based view and other fields of strategic management theory (Prahalad and Hamel, 1990; Teece and Pisano, 1994; Teece, 2000).

4

Technical problems, faced by the National Institution of Social Security, in updating and releasing specific data on the labour market, constrained us to limit our analysis to this period. Unfortunately more updated, data coming from other sources, are not as suitable and reliable as NISS data (for a review on statistical sources concerning the Italian labour market and its flexibility see Contini 2002).

5

A system that categorizes invention by product or process.

6

It must be remarked that the NISS data used in the current analysis concern the firm and not the single worker as observation unit. This information allows us to considerably simplify the framework of worker flows. In this way we avoid taking into account the personnel movements among subsidiaries or plants belonging to the same firm and only consider the inter-firm mobility.

33

7

In other terms, we used pre-tax wages including basic wage, overtime wage, bonuses,

allowances and subsidies only paid by the employers. 8

More precisely, we redefined only 2 classes, aggregating high and medium-high technology sectors in hi-tech, and low and medium-low technology sectors in low-tech. It must be remarked that some two-digit sectors have been aggregated in order to resolve matching problems between the patents dataset and the labour market’s variables dataset. We obtained 10 industries from this aggregation process. Therefore, hi-tech includes: 1)Coke and Refined Petroleum Products, Chemical Products and Synthetic Fibres, Plastic Products; 2)Machinery, Electrical Equipment, Television, Office machinery, Medical Components and Mesuring Instruments; 3)Motor Vehicles, Transport Equipment. Low-tech embodies: 4) Food, Beverages and Tobacco; 5)Textile Products, the Garment Industry, the Leather Industry, Luggage, Handbags and Footwear; 6)Paper, Printing and Publishing; 7)Wood, Furniture and Other Manufacturing; 8)Non-Metallic Mineral Products; 9)Fabricated and Structural Metal Products; 10)Building.

9

For example, a significant proportion of some of the Motor Vehicle industries’ R&D concerns electronics. Accordingly, the R&D intensity of the Motor Vehicle industry will be overestimated, while that of electronics will be underestimated.

10

There are some branches of the mechanical and chemical sectors considered as hi-tech, but included in SMI technological classes. However, the Italian case notably reflects Malerba and Orsenigo’s claim regarding the fact that SMI technological classes are to be found especially in the traditional low-tech sectors, whereas most of chemical and electronic technologies are characterized by the SMII model (Malerba and Orsenigo, 1996, p.463). Moreover, Pieroni and Pompei (2006) found a high correlation between hi-tech/SMII and low-tech/SMI in carrying out an analysis concerning the Italian context that was very similar to this one.

34

11

It is known that valid instruments are y i ,t − 2 and lagged values of xi' ,t .

12

Obviously, the sectors are taken from the regional level.

13

In order to save space, the results of static model (4) are not reported. The estimated results, the full data set and the program carried out with package STATA 8 are available upon request to the authors.

14

We could not directly control for R&D investments by including them on the right side of the econometric specification, because of the lack of a suitable breakdown of R&D data involving both a sectoral and regional profile. For this reason we think that temporal dummies also capture the influence that R&D investment flows exert on patent activities.

35

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QUADERNI DEL DIPARTIMENTO DI ECONOMIA, FINANZA E STATISTICA Università degli Studi di Perugia 1

Gennaio 2005

Giuseppe CALZONI Valentina BACCHETTINI

2

Marzo 2005

3

Aprile 2005

Fabrizio LUCIANI Marilena MIRONIUC Mirella DAMIANI

4

Aprile 2005

Mirella DAMIANI

5

Aprile 2005

Marcello SIGNORELLI

6

Maggio 2005

7

Maggio 2005

Cristiano PERUGINI Paolo POLINORI Marcello SIGNORELLI Cristiano PERUGINI Marcello SIGNORELLI

8

Maggio 2005

Marcello SIGNORELLI

9

Maggio 2005

10

Giugno 2005

Flavio ANGELINI Stefano HERZEL Slawomir BUKOWSKI

11

Giugno 2005

Luca PIERONI Matteo RICCIARELLI

12

Giugno 2005

Luca PIERONI Fabrizio POMPEI

13

Giugno 2005

David ARISTEI Luca PIERONI

14

Giugno 2005

15

Giugno 2005

Luca PIERONI Fabrizio POMPEI Carlo Andrea BOLLINO Paolo POLINORI

I

Il concetto di competitività tra approccio classico e teorie evolutive. Caratteristiche e aspetti della sua determinazione Ambiental policies in Romania. Tendencies and perspectives Costi di agenzia e diritti di proprietà: una premessa al problema del governo societario Proprietà, accesso e controllo: nuovi sviluppi nella teoria dell’impresa ed implicazioni di corporate governance Employment and policies in Europe: a regional perspective An empirical analysis of employment and growth dynamics in the italian and polish regions Employment differences, convergences and similarities in italian provinces Growth and employment: comparative performance, convergences and co-movements Implied volatilities of caps: a gaussian approach EMU – Fiscal challenges: conclusions for the new EU members Modelling dynamic storage function in commodity markets: theory and evidence Innovations and labour market institutions: an empirical analysis of the Italian case in the middle 90’s Estimating the role of government expenditure in long-run consumption Investimenti diretti esteri e innovazione in Umbria Il valore aggiunto su scala comunale: la Regione Umbria 20012003

16

Giugno 2005

Carlo Andrea BOLLINO Paolo POLINORI

17

Giugno 2005

18

Agosto 2005

Antonella FINIZIA Riccardo MAGNANI Federico PERALI Paolo POLINORI Cristina SALVIONI Elżbieta KOMOSA

19

Settembre 2005

Barbara MROCZKOWSKA

20

Ottobre 2005

Luca SCRUCCA

21

Febbraio 2006

Marco BOCCACCIO

22

Settembre 2006

23

Settembre 2006

Mirko ABBRITTI Andrea BOITANI Mirella DAMIANI Luca SCRUCCA

24

Ottobre 2006

Sławomir I. BUKOWSKI

25

Ottobre 2006

Jan L. BEDNARCZYK

26

Dicembre 2006

Fabrizio LUCIANI

27

Dicembre 2006

Elvira LUSSANA

28

Marzo 2007

Luca PIERONI Fabrizio POMPEI

Gli incentivi agli investimenti: un’analisi dell’efficienza industriale su scala geografica regionale e sub regionale Construction and simulation of the general economic equilibrium model Meg-Ismea for the italian economy Problems of financing small and medium-sized enterprises. Selected methods of financing innovative ventures Regional policy of supporting small and medium-sized businesses Clustering multivariate spatial data based on local measures of spatial autocorrelation Crisi del welfare e nuove proposte: il caso dell’unconditional basic income Unemployment, inflation and monetary policy in a dynamic New Keynesian model with hiring costs Subset selection in dimension reduction methods The Maastricht convergence criteria and economic growth in the EMU The concept of neutral inflation and its application to the EU economic growth analyses Sinossi dell’approccio teorico alle problematiche ambientali in campo agricolo e naturalistico; il progetto di ricerca nazionale F.I.S.R. – M.I.C.E.N.A. Mediterraneo: una storia incompleta Evaluating innovation and labour market relationships: the case of Italy

II

ISSN 1722-618X I QUADERNI DEL DIPARTIMENTO DI ECONOMIA Università degli Studi di Perugia 1

Dicembre 2002

Luca PIERONI:

Further evidence of dynamic demand systems in three european countries Il valore economico del paesaggio: un'indagine microeconomica A note on internal rate of return

2

Dicembre 2002

3

Dicembre 2002

4

Marzo 2004

Luca PIERONI Paolo POLINORI: Luca PIERONI Paolo POLINORI: Sara BIAGINI:

5

Aprile 2004

Cristiano PERUGINI:

6

Maggio 2004

Mirella DAMIANI:

7

Maggio 2004

Mauro VISAGGIO:

8

Maggio 2004

Mauro VISAGGIO:

9

Giugno 2004

10

Giugno 2004

Elisabetta CROCI ANGELINI Francesco FARINA: Marco BOCCACCIO:

11

Giugno 2004

12

Luglio 2004

13

Luglio 2004

14

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15

Novembre 2004

Gaetano MARTINO Cristiano PERUGINI

16

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Federico PERALI Paolo POLINORI Cristina SALVIONI Nicola TOMMASI Marcella VERONESI

Cristiano PERUGINI Marcello SIGNORELLI: Cristiano PERUGINI Marcello SIGNORELLI: Cristiano PERUGINI Marcello SIGNORELLI: Cristiano PERUGINI:

III

A new class of strategies and application to utility maximization for unbounded processes La dipendenza dell'agricoltura italiana dal sostegno pubblico: un'analisi a livello regionale Nuova macroeconomia keynesiana e quasi razionalità Dimensione e persistenza degli aggiustamenti fiscali in presenza di debito pubblico elevato Does the growth stability pact provide an adequate and consistent fiscal rule? Redistribution and labour market institutions in OECD countries Tra regolamentazione settoriale e antitrust: il caso delle telecomunicazioni Labour market performance in central european countries Labour market structure in the italian provinces: a cluster analysis I flussi in entrata nei mercati del lavoro umbri: un’analisi di cluster Una valutazione a livello microeconomico del sostegno pubblico di breve periodo all’agricoltura. Il caso dell’Umbria attraverso i dati RICA-INEA Economic inequality and rural systems: empirical evidence and interpretative attempts Bilancio ambientale delle imprese agricole italiane: stima dell’inquinamento effettivo