Weaker jobs, weaker innovation. Exploring the effects of temporary employment on new products

Cetrulo, Armanda; Cirillo, Valeria; Guarascio, Dario

doi:10.1080/00036846.2019.1619015

Cited by 46 publications

(38 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…Instead, for women entrepreneurs, ability to fund working capital, either through internal funds or local banks, was a key only for posting rising sales. Moreover, and in contrast to the literature on temporary employment and innovation (Cetrulo et al, 2019), female-owned firms with more temporary workers were more likely to innovate. These findings indicate that while land ownership as collateral is key for the scale of the business, it is less critical for small firms' growth and innovation, where other factors such as working capital and labor seem to be key constraints.…”

Section: Resultscontrasting

confidence: 93%

Enterprising Women in Southern Africa: When Does Land Ownership Matter?

2020

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Limited access to finance remains one of the major barriers for women entrepreneurs in Africa. This paper presents a model of start-ups in which firms’ sales and profits depend on their productivity and access to credit. However, due to the lack of collateral assets such as land, female entrepreneurs have more constrained access to credit than do men. Testing the model on data from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys in Eswatini, Lesotho, and Zimbabwe, we find land ownership to be important for female entrepreneurial performance in terms of sales levels. These results suggest that the small Southern African economies would benefit from removing obstacles to female land tenure and enabling financial institutions to lend against movable collateral. Although land ownership is linked with higher sales levels, it is less critical for sales growth and innovation where access to short term loans for working capital seems to be key.

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Section: Resultscontrasting

confidence: 93%

Enterprising Women in Southern Africa: When Does Land Ownership Matter?

2020

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“…In contrast, a "systematic approach" to numerical flexibility refers to long-term use of temporary positions during any period and is in line with the "dead end" hypothesis (Both et al 2002). As already argued, there are various theoretical reasons why labour flexibility reduces the incentive for innovation (Lucidi and Kleinknecht 2010;Cetrulo et al 2019; Hoxha and Kleinknecht 2020) while increasing competition based on "low road" practices (Osterman 2018) such as cutting labour costs, maintaining low-productive jobs and reducing training activities. This cluster of low-productive firms survived the 2008 financial crisis.…”

Section: Firm Heterogeneity and Temporary Work: Background Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Few studies explicitly consider the role of heterogeneity across firms and sectors, although there are some that focus on heterogeneity in terms of technological opportunities and technological regimes (Cetrulo et al 2019;Hoxha and Kleinknecht 2020).…”

Section: Firm Heterogeneity and Temporary Work: Background Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Heterogeneity matters: temporary employment, productivity and wages in Italian firms

Cirillo

Ricci

2020

Econ Polit

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This study analyses the relationship between flexible employment, productivity and wages, along their distributions. We use an original firm-level dataset, which combines information on workplace characteristics from Rilevazione su Imprese e Lavoro (RIL) with the Analisi Informatizzata delle Aziende Italiane (AIDA) balance sheet information for the universe of Italian non-agriculture/financial corporations. We employ different quantile regression models to panel data and find, first, that use of temporary contracts is associated to a reduction in labour productivity and wages at each point in the corresponding distribution; and second, that the negative relationship between labour productivity and wages decreases in magnitude along the quantiles of the productivity and wage distributions, suggesting that low-productive/ low-wage firms use temporary employment to permanently staff positions and to compress labour costs.

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“…Along this line, several empirical analyses have been carried out with the aim of empirically investigate the relationship between the deregulation of labour market and technological progress (Cirillo and Ricci 2020;Hoxha and Kleinknecht 2020;Sheehan 1999, 2003;Vergeer and Kleinknecht 2010). Among industry-level studies, the work by Cetrulo et al (2019) is worth mentioning. By making use of European industry-level data, the authors assess the existence of a negative relationship between temporary employment and propensity to introduce product innovation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…fixed-term jobs) and the empirical exercise is carried out focusing only on product innovation. It follows that, on the one hand, the analysis provided by Cetrulo et al (2019) does not allow for a comprehensive assessment of the impact of different forms of NSW on technological progress. On the other hand, their findings suggest that NSW is harmful to the introduction of new products as the latter rely mainly on the accumulation of knowledge but leave open the possibility that nonstandard contractual arrangements might be conducive to the introduction of labour-saving technologies, i.e.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Non-standard work and innovation: evidence from European industries

Reljic

Cetrulo

Cirillo

et al. 2021

Economics of Innovation and New Technology

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Following a market-oriented approach, policies aimed at increasing labour flexibility by weakening employment protection institutions should enable firms to efficiently allocate resources, improve their capability to compete on international markets and adjust to economic cycle. This work documents the rise of non-standard (i.e. temporary and part-time) work in five European countries (Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom) over the period 1994-2016 and investigate the nexus between the use of non-standard work and innovation performance using data for 18 manufacturing and 23 service industries. Contrary to the objectives that market-oriented policy recommendations promised to achieve, we show that there is a significantly negative association between the share of workers employed under nonstandard contractual arrangements and the introduction of both product and process innovation. Furthermore, we show that the harmful consequences of the spread of non-standard work on firms' product innovation propensity are more pronounced in high-tech sectors.

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Weaker jobs, weaker innovation. Exploring the effects of temporary employment on new products

Cited by 46 publications

References 48 publications

Enterprising Women in Southern Africa: When Does Land Ownership Matter?

Enterprising Women in Southern Africa: When Does Land Ownership Matter?

Heterogeneity matters: temporary employment, productivity and wages in Italian firms

Non-standard work and innovation: evidence from European industries

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