Federico Biagi

Relative demand for highly skilled workers and use of different ICT technologies

ABSTRACT This study investigates the relationship between several indicators of ICT usage and digitalization and the relative demand for highly skilled workers. The data are based on two-digit industry-level information on seven European countries for the period 2001–2010. For manufacturing industries, static fixed-effects models show that the share of employees with internet broadband access, the diffusion of mobile internet access and the use of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and automatic data exchange combined with electronic invoicing are all significantly and positively related to skill intensity in the industries observed. For service industries, only mobile internet usage intensity is significant. Specifically for manufacturing, a 10-point increase in the percentage of firms using ERP systems is associated with an increase in the share of highly skilled workers by 0.4 percentage points. These estimates indicate that the increase in ERP system usage during the period studied accounted for 30% of the increase in the share of workers with a tertiary degree across manufacturing industries and countries. The results are robust with respect to the estimation method and the potential endogeneity of ICT.

Are ICT Displacing Workers? Evidence from Seven European Countries

This paper examines the short run labour substitution effects of using ICT at firm-level in the manufacturing and services sectors in seven European countries, during the period 2007–2010. The data come from a unique dataset provided by the ESSLait Project on Linking Microdata, which contains internationally comparable data based on the production statistics linked at firm level with the novel ICT usage indicators. We adopt a standard conditional labour demand model and control for unobservable time-invariant firm-specific effects. The results show that ICT use has a statistically insignificant labour substitution effect and this effect is robust across countries, sectors and measures of ICT use. Our findings suggest that increased use of ICT within firms does not reduce the numbers of workers they employ.

Le aste e i Servizi pubblici locali

Le aste e i Servizi pubblici locali (di Barbara Antonioli, Federico Biagi e Roberto Fazioli) - ABSTRACT: In Italy, local public utilities are undergoing a radical change in organizational and market structure. The main aim is to extend contestability in order to introduce competition in those sectors. In fact, services are actually assigned to local public firms without auction (direct assignment); firms operate as legal territorial monopolists. Thus, Italian policy makers are planning to switch from a command-and-control kind of approach to a contract-based one, such as competitive tendering by auction (competition for the market). The adoption of the instrument of auction for local utilities, though, appears to be very difficult, mainly because of the multidimensionality of the output. The need to consider other variables than the price, such as quality, enforces to redefine the structure of the auction. The purpose of this study is to suggest a new, multilayered, form of auction, which would enable local policy makers to select local utilities firms considering both economic and qualitative variables.

Routinization and the Labour Market: Evidence from European Countries

In this chapter, we analyse the routinization process in European countries, using the longitudinal component of the EU Survey on Income and Living Conditions (SILC). Our findings confirm that routine jobs and the routine intensity of jobs are decreasing in time. Further, we study the determinants of routinization, using the EU-SILC data, and find that young individuals are more likely to hold routine jobs, as are workers with lower education or those employed in temporary jobs. This evidence applies for overall Europe as well as for different groups of countries. Finally, routinization represents a driver of unemployment inflows: individuals in routine jobs display, ceteris paribus, a higher probability to become unemployed: a one standard deviation increase in the RTI index entails a 10% increase of getting into unemployment.