Inter-industry job mobility in the knowledge economy in Finland

Abstract

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to investigate inter-industry labor mobility, paying special attention to workers who move into high-tech (HT) sectors or knowledge-intensive business services (KIBSs). This study inquires whether skilled workers are mobile and whether the characteristics of mobile workers support the effective transfer of knowledge across industries. Design/methodology/approach -Census data representing 7 percent of Finnish residents were used. The micro-econometric estimation method with correction of sample selection bias was applied. Findings -The results show that young workers are the most mobile, whereas mobility decreased for those with previous work experience, higher education and higher income level. These findings indicate that the highly skilled workers are not necessarily the most mobile, a trend that may weaken the effectiveness of knowledge spillover. However, on average, highly educated workers move into KIBS sectors more often than to other sectors, and HT sectors attract workers who have higher incomes, which may indicate that their skills are highly valued. As a result, knowledge spillovers may emerge. The knowledge spillovers resulting from job mobility are concentrated in large growth centers that have universities. Originality/value -This study provides a new and topical viewpoint to the mobility literature by focussing on skilled workers and their movement toward the HT and KIBS sectors. IntroductionIn knowledge-driven economies, economic development and technological progress are highly dependent on the accumulation and diffusion of knowledge. The high-tech (HT) sectors and knowledge-intensive business services (KIBSs) are essential aspects of what is known as the knowledge economy. The emergence of the knowledge economy, which demands that people spend more time maintaining and renewing their human capital over the course of their working career, has had a significant effect on job mobility in both the internal labor market (through in-work transitions, multi-skilling, multi-tasking, etc.) and the external labor market. Moreover, the globalization of the economy, and the resulting pressure on employers to more rapidly adapt the workforce to changes in aggregate demand, has increased turnover in the labor market (Korpi and Mertens, 2004). Due to the increasingly rapid spread of knowledge, the demand for low-skill labor is decreasing in favor of more educated and highly skilled workers (Muffels and Luijkx, 2008;Lee et al., 2010). It is assumed that the mobility of highly educated and innovation-intensive workers between firms and industries acts to ensure the diffusion and circulation of knowledge, in turn increasing overall knowledge and innovation (see e.g. Almeida and Kogut, 1999;Breschi and Lissoni, 2003;

The role of knowledge intensive business services in economic development: a bibliometric analysis from Bradford, Lotka and Zipf laws

“…From these summaries, we created a "word cloud", composed by those words more frequently mentioned in the texts, as shown in Figure 5. In the second term, we notice that publications are composed of studies carried out by Mukkala & Tohmo (2013), and Mas-Tur & Soriano (2013), who focus on KIBS' attributes and start-up companies for capacity improvement. Others address the variables, differences and mainly innovation management capacity in KIBS (Hipp et al, 2013;Asikainen, 2013), besides the transfer and diffusion of knowledge from geographic and technological distances and in networks (Najafi-Tavani et al, 2014;Rodriguez, 2014).…”