Martin Hud

Innovation, Creative Destruction and Structural Change: Firm-Level Evidence from European Countries

Abstract The shift of employment from lower to higher productive firms is an important driver for structural change and industry dynamics. We investigate this reallocation in terms of employment gains and losses from innovation. New employment created by product innovation may be offset by employment losses in related products, known as ‘cannibalisation’ or ‘business stealing’ effects in the literature, by employment losses from process and organisational innovation and by general productivity increases. The paper investigates this effect empirically with a large data set from the European Community Innovation Survey. We find that employment gains and losses increase with technology intensity of the sector. High-technology manufacturing shows the strongest employment gains and losses from innovation, followed by knowledge-intensive services, low-technology manufacturing and less knowledge-intensive services. The net contribution of innovation to employment growth is mostly positive, an exception being manufacturing industries in recession periods.

Employment Effects of Innovations over the Business Cycle: Firm-Level Evidence from European Countries

A growing literature investigates how firms’ innovation input reacts to changes in the business cycle. However, so far there is no evidence whether there is cyclicality in the effects of innovation on firm performance as well. In this paper, we investigate the employment effects of innovations over the business cycle. Our analysis employs a large data set of manufacturing firms from 26 European countries over the period from 1998 to 2010. Using the structural model of Harrison et al. (2014), our empirical analysis reveals four important findings: First, the net effect of product innovation on employment growth is pro-cyclical. It turns out to be positive in all business cycle phases except for the recession. Second, product innovators are more resilient to recessions than non-product innovators. Even during recessions they are able to substitute demand losses from old products by demand gains of new products to a substantial degree. As a result their net employment losses are significantly lower in recessions than those of non-product innovators. Third, we only find resilience for SMEs but not for large firms. Fourth, process and organizational innovations displace labor primarily during upturn and downturn periods.

Mannheimer Innovationspanel (MIP), Scientific-Use-Files

Das ZEW erhebt seit 1993 jahrlich Daten zum Innovationsverhalten der deutschen Wirtschaft. Die Innovationserhebung deckt die Bereiche Bergbau, verarbeitendes Gewerbe, Energie, Baugewerbe, unternehmensnahe Dienstleistungen und distributive Dienstleistungen ab. Sie ist fur Deutschland reprasentativ und ermoglicht Hochrechnung fur die deutsche Wirtschaft insgesamt sowie fur einzelne Branchengruppen. Es wird im Auftrag des BMBF und in Kooperation mit infas und dem Fraunhofer-ISI durchgefuhrt. Das MIP ist gleichzeitig der deutsche Beitrag zu den Community Innovation Surveys (CIS) der Europaischen Kommission.