ESSAYS ON THE EMPLOYMENT IMPACT OF TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION

Date

2025-3-6

Author

CEBİR BENLİ, BİLGEN

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

51
views

42
downloads

Cite This

The employment impact of technological innovation has long been debated in economic literature. This Thesis explores this issue in developing countries in two different contexts. Using firm level survey data collected by World Bank, the first essay examines the employment impact of technological innovation by applying the methodology of Harrison et al. (2014) and extended by Cirera and Sabetti (2019) with the same data set we use. We extend the model in a different way by controlling the potential employment impact of business obstacles perceived by the firms. Our findings align with most of the literature in the sense that product innovation enhances labor and this result is robust under various specifications or in different regions whereas the impact of process innovation is not so visible. For the pooled sample, the process innovation is labor-saving. On regional base, we obtain a robust result for labor-saving effect of process innovation only for Africa. On the other hand, controlling the perceived business obstacles improves the statistical significance of labor-saving impact of process innovation for South Asia, ECA and MENA in some cases. The second essay examines how pre-shock technological innovation affects firm-level employment during that shock, with a reference to COVID-19 Pandemic. By using WBES and its COVID-19 Follow-Up surveys, we estimate the employment impact of pre-COVID technological innovation during the Pandemic. The results indicate that firms engaging in product innovation in pre-Pandemic period have been more resilient in maintaining employment levels during the Pandemic while process innovation reveals no significant impact.

Subject Keywords

Technological Innovation, Employment, Product Innovation, Process Innovation, Economic Shocks

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/114039

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis