Friday, 10 January 2020

The innovation premium to soft skills in low-skilled occupations

a column by Philippe Aghion, Antonin Bergeaud, Richard Blundell and Rachel Griffith for VOX: CEPR’s Policy Portal

A growing literature emphasises that firm heterogeneity plays a large role in explaining wage differences across workers.

This column highlights one channel through which firm features feed through into the wages of workers in low-skilled occupations, namely, the interplay between a firm's innovativeness and the complementarity between the (soft) skills of workers in low-skilled occupations and the firm's other assets. It shows that more R-and-D-intensive firms pay higher wages on average, and in particular workers in certain low-skilled occupations benefit considerably from working in more R-and-D-intensive firms.

Continue reading presents an interesting viewpoint, and there are illustrative graphs.

Labels:
low-skilled_workers, innovation, R-and-D, income_inequality,


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