Flexible Labor and Innovation Performance: Evidence from Longitudinal Firm-Level Data

Firms with high shares of workers on fixed-term contracts have significantly higher sales of imitative new products but perform significantly worse on sales of inno¬va¬tive new products (“first on the marketâ€). High functional flexibility in “insider-outsider†la¬bor markets enhances a firm’s new product sales, as do training efforts and highly edu¬ca¬¬ted personnel. We find weak evidence that larger and older firms have higher new pro¬duct sales than do younger and smaller firms. Our findings should be food for thought to eco-nomists making unqualified pleas for the deregulation of labor markets.J5;M5;O15;O31;OSA longitudinal dataset;SMEs;innovation performance;new product sales;numerical flexibility

Are there Schumpeterian Waves of Innovations?

This paper responds to a recent criticism of the empirical evidence of bunching of innovations. An examination of various long-run innovation samples shows that there is indeed very poor evidence of innovation waves in the time before the mid-19th century. Thereafter, however, two long waves of major innovations occur, both having a lead of approximately 10-15 years over the economic long wave as identified in an earlier study. A t-test confirms that these waves can be clearly distinguished from random fluctuations. In the final section some suggestions for further research are outlined

Kondratieff Long Waves In Aggregate Output? An Econometric Test

From the very beginning of the long-wave debate (interrupted several times in the past), at the forefront of interest has been the question of reliable proof of the existence of long waves as reflected in real economic data series. Once proved it would be easier to correlate them with other important economic variables and look for possible causal relations. However simple this may seem in principle, this paper shows how difficult this problem is in practice. Even if no one questions the fluctuations of economic data, the problem of finding in them a coherent pattern is complicated. The novel method described here seems to be well suited for depicting trends in "long economic movements" -- an expression that draws less opposition than the simple idea of periodic cycles. Important insight is shown in the authors' analysis of the data of many countries. This paper is a significant step in pursuit of the most important issue in the long-wave debate -- to produce reliable data and methods that will shed the necessary light on the question of the existence of long waves

Measuring the unmeasurable: a country's non-R and D expenditure on product and service innovation

Knowledge about non-R and D expenditure on innovation activities such as patenting and licensing, design, trial production, tooling-up, manpower training,market research and investment in fixed assets, is still extremely sparse. Questions about the latter were very poorly answered in the recent CommunityInnovation Survey (CIS). With the aid of information regarding the quality of replies, we estimate missing values and then reach a national estimate of1992 innovation expenditure in the manufacturing and service industries of the Netherlands. For policy discussions as well as for modelling, it isinteresting to note that expenditure on product-related R and D (6,24 billion guilders) represents about 26% of total product (and service) innovationexpenditure, the latter including 125 billion guilders for investment in fixed assets

The impact of Labour Relations on Innovative Output: An Exploration of Firm-level Data in the Netherlands

A growing literature on determinants of innovative per- formance focuses on factors such as market structure, firm size, (regional and international) knowledge spill- overs, R&D collaboration, conditions for appropriation of innovation benefits, and others. This paper contrib- utes to an aspect that is still sparsely explored: The im- pact of labour relations and Human Resource Manage- ment (HRM) practices on a firm’s innovative behaviour. Our empirical findings identify that active HRM policies, including job rotation, performance pay, and high qualification levels of personnel contribute positively to innovative performance