Siddharth Sharma

Firing costs and flexibility: Evidence from firms' employment responses to shocks in India

A key prediction of dynamic labor demand models is that firing restrictions attenuate firms employment responses to economic fluctuations. We provide the first direct test of this prediction using data from India. We exploit the fact that rainfall fluctuations, through their effects on agricultural productivity, generate variation in local demand within districts over time. Consistent with the theory, we find that industrial employment is more sensitive to shocks where labor regulation is less restrictive. Our results are robust to controlling for endogenous firm placement and vary across factory size in a pattern consistent with institutional features of Indian labor law.

Green Growth, Technology and Innovation

The paper explores existing patterns of green innovation and presents an overview of green innovation policies for developing countries. The key findings from the empirical analysis are: (1) frontier green innovations are concentrated in high-income countries, few in developing countries but growing; (2) the most technologically-sophisticated developing countries are emerging as significant innovators but limited to a few technology fields; (3) there is very little South-South collaboration; (4) there is potential for expanding green production and trade; and (5) there has been little base-of-pyramid green innovation to meet the needs of poor consumers, and it is too early to draw conclusions about its scalability. To promote green innovation, technology and environmental policies work best in tandem, focusing on three complementary areas: (1) to promote frontier innovation, it is advisable to limit local technology-push support to countries with sufficient technological capabilities -- but there is also a need to provide global technology-push support for base-of-pyramid and neglected technologies including through a pool of long-term, stable funds supported by demand-pull mechanisms such as prizes; (2) to promote catch-up innovation, it is essential both to facilitate technology access and to stimulate technology absorption by firms -- with critical roles played by international trade and foreign direct investment, with firm demand spurred by public procurement, regulations and standards; and (3) to develop absorptive capacity, there is a need to strengthen skills and to improve the prevailing business environment for innovation -- to foster increased experimentation, global learning, and talent attraction and retention. There is still considerable progress to be made in ranking green innovation policies as most appropriate for different developing country contexts -- based on more impact evaluation studies of innovation policies targeted at green technologies.

Measuring intangible assets in an emerging market economy: an application to Brazil

This paper measures intangible investment in Brazil. It estimates that during 2000-2008, annual business spending on intangible assets or knowledge-based capital in Brazil averaged about 4 percent of gross domestic product. While this is significantly lower than comparable rates for the United States, Japan and the United Kingdom, which hover around 11 percent, it is not too far below estimates for other developed countries such as Italy and Spain. Of the total expenditure on intangible assets in 2006, about 23 percent was spent on computer software and databases, 43 percent on innovative property (predominantly research and development and new product development in financial services), and 34 percent on economic competencies (which comprises branding, employee training and organization improvement). Brazils share of spending on economic competencies is markedly lower than that observed in the United States and the United Kingdom, and the analysis finds it to be the slowest growing of the major intangible categories. Finally, having extended the intangible investment estimation methodology to produce more disaggregated (industry-level) estimates, the authors show that intangible investment is positively correlated with recent export growth and total factor productivity estimates across manufacturing industries. This suggests that intangible or knowledge-based capital, as measured here, can account for part of the hitherto unexplained component of productivity growth.

Who are the Unbanked

This paper uses nationally representative survey data from Mexico to compare households with savings accounts in formal financial institutions to their neighbors who do not have such accounts. The survey, which was conducted in 2005, contains information on nearly 5,000 households. The findings show that although neighboring banked and unbanked households have similar demographic and occupational profiles, the former are more educated and have markedly greater wealth. The median banked household spends 32 percent more per capita than the median unbanked household, and the median per capita wealth in banked households is 88 percent higher than that in unbanked households. The findings suggest that education levels, wealth, and unobserved household attributes that might be correlated with wealth and education play a major role in explaining who is banked.

Financial Development and Innovation in Small Firms

This paper uses firm level data from a cross-section of 57 countries to study how financial development affects innovation in small firms. The analysis finds that relative to large firms in the same industry, spending on research and development by small firms is more likely and sizable in countries at higher levels of financial development. The estimates imply that among firms doing research and development in a country like Romania, which is at the 20th percentile of financial development, a 1 standard deviation decrease in firm size is associated with a decrease of 0.7 standard deviations in research and development spending. In contrast, this decrease is only 0.2 standard deviations in a country like South Africa, which is at the 80th percentile of the distribution of financial development. Small firms also report producing more innovations per unit of research and development spending than large firms, and this gap is narrower in countries at higher levels of financial development. As a robustness check, the author shows that these patterns are stronger in industries inherently more reliant on external finance.

Internal borders and migration in India

Internal mobility is a critical component of economic growth and development, as it enables the reallocation of labor to more productive opportunities across sectors and regions. Using detailed district-to-district migration data from the 2001 Census of India, the paper highlights the role of state borders as significant impediments to internal mobility. The analysis finds that average migration between neighboring districts in the same state is at least 50 percent larger than neighboring districts on different sides of a state border, even after accounting for linguistic differences. Although the impact of state borders differs by education, age, and reason for migration, it is always large and significant. The paper suggests that inter-state mobility is inhibited by state-level entitlement schemes, ranging from access to subsidized goods through the public distribution system to the bias for states own residents in access to tertiary education and public sector employment.

The labor market effects of financial crises : the role of temporary contracts in central and western Europe

This paper examines how the 2008-09 financial crisis affected labor markets in Central and Western Europe, and how this impact depended on employment protections laws. Using a differences-in-differences approach that compares industries with varying degrees of inherent dependence on external financing, the analysis finds that the crisis had significant negative impacts on employment, particularly on temporary, less skilled, and younger workers. These impacts on the level and composition of employment were significantly stronger in countries with stronger legal protection of permanent workers from dismissal. This finding suggests that, given regulatory inflexibility in adjusting the permanent workforce, firms responded to tightening financial constraints by disproportionately laying off temporary workers (who tend to be younger and less skilled than permanent workers).

Enforcement capacity and the impact of labor regulation: evidence from the Russian Federation

The impact of business regulations on firms could depend on how the regulations are enforced in practice. Exploiting variation in enforcement capacity across the Russian Federations administrative regions, this paper examines whether the enforcement of restrictive regulations on hiring and firing workers affects how firms adjust employment during industry upswings and downswings. The analysis finds that the extent to which firms adjust employment upward during industry upswings and downward during downswings is smaller in regions with stronger enforcement capacity (or stricter de facto employment protection). The effect of enforcement is sizable: for example, increasing enforcement capacity from the 25th to the 75th percentile dampens employment adjustment in a downswing by 34 percent. Thus, although restrictive regulation on hiring and firing reduces the ability of firms to adjust employment, the extent to which it does so depends on enforcement.