The Effect of Innovation on Employment: An ARDL Bounds Testing Approach for Turkey

Since the acceleration of technological advancements, many studies have been done in the economics literature on the direction and extent of the relationship between innovation and employment. The findings of these studies indicate that there is no unanimity among the researchers on an innovation-employment relationship. Based on annual data for the 1990-2018 period, this paper investigates the effect of innovation on employment in the Turkish economy using the ARDL bounds testing approach. The results obtained from the analysis show that exports of high-tech products, R&D expenditures, and changes in the number of firms positively affect employment, whereas, contrary to expectations, the number of domestic patent applications seems to affect it negatively.