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Innovation, Workers Skills and Industrial Relations: Empirical Evidence from Firm-level Italian Data

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  • Davide Antonioli
  • Paolo Pini
  • Rocco Manzalini

Abstract

The shifting of labour demand towards relatively more skilled workers has been a hot issue in the economic field for many years. A consolidated explanation for the upskilling phenomenon is that technological-organisational changes have driven the labour demand with detrimental consequences for less skilled workers (skill-biased technological-organisational change). In order to upgrade the skill workforce the firm has at least two main channels at its disposal: the external labour market strategy, mainly based on hiring and firing mechanisms; the internal labour market strategies, which improve the skill base of the employees through training activities. The main objective of the present work is to verify the relations between innovative strategies and both the workforce composition and the training activities, within an integrated framework that also leads us to consider the role of specific aspects of the industrial relations system. The firm level analysis is based on original datasets which include data on manufacturing firms for two Italian local production systems, located in the Emilia-Romagna region. The results suggest that the firms use both the two channels to improve their skill base, which is actually related to the innovation activities, although there is weak supporting evidence of the use of external labour markets to upgrade the workforce skills: the upskilling phenomenon seems to be associated to specific innovative activities in the technological sphere, while specific organisational aspects emerge as detrimental for blue collars. On the side of internal labour market strategies the evidence supports the hypothesis that innovation intensity induce the firms to implement internal procedures in order to upskill the workforce, confirming the importance of internal labour market strategies. Moreover, we have recognized the important role of firm level industrial relations in determining the training activities for the blue collar workers.

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  • Davide Antonioli & Paolo Pini & Rocco Manzalini, 2011. "Innovation, Workers Skills and Industrial Relations: Empirical Evidence from Firm-level Italian Data," Working Papers 201106, University of Ferrara, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:udf:wpaper:201106
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    Cited by:

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    2. Rosalia Castellano & Gaetano Musella & Gennaro Punzo, 2023. "Does context matter? Exploring the effects of productive structures on the relationship between innovation and workforce skills’ complementarity," Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology, Springer, vol. 57(3), pages 1991-2011, June.
    3. Beblavý, Miroslav & Thum, Anna-Elisabeth & Potjagailo, Galina, 2013. "When do adults learn? A cohort analysis of adult education in Europe," CEPS Papers 8059, Centre for European Policy Studies.
    4. Julia Bock-Schappelwein & Rainer Eppel & Ulrike Famira-Mühlberger & Agnes Kügler & Helmut Mahringer & Fabian Unterlass & Christine Zulehner, 2016. "Die Wirkung von Innovationsaktivitäten geförderter österreichischer Unternehmen auf die Belegschaft," WIFO Studies, WIFO, number 58930.
    5. Sandra Silva & Jorge Valente & Aurora Teixeira, 2012. "An evolutionary model of industry dynamics and firms’ institutional behavior with job search, bargaining and matching," Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination, Springer;Society for Economic Science with Heterogeneous Interacting Agents, vol. 7(1), pages 23-61, May.
    6. Antonioli, Davide & Mazzanti, Massimiliano, 2017. "Towards a green economy through innovations: The role of trade union involvement," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 131(C), pages 286-299.
    7. Mehmet Ugur & Sefa Awaworyi Churchill & Edna Solomon, 2018. "Technological Innovation And Employment In Derived Labour Demand Models: A Hierarchical Meta†Regression Analysis," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 32(1), pages 50-82, February.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    technological change; organisational change; industrial relations; skills;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J24 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity
    • J53 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Labor-Management Relations, Trade Unions, and Collective Bargaining - - - Labor-Management Relations; Industrial Jurisprudence
    • L23 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior - - - Organization of Production
    • L6 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Manufacturing
    • O33 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Technological Change: Choices and Consequences; Diffusion Processes

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