Innovation and Employment: Evidence from Italian Microdata

The microeconomic empirical literature devoted to the link between innovation and employment tends to suggest that technological change has a positive effect on jobs, at least at the firm-level. The main purpose of this paper is to see whether this result still holds in a situation where intermediate technologies are implemented mainly through non R&D expenditures, as in Italian manufacturing. Applying GMM-SYS to an employment equation augmented for technology and using a unique longitudinal dataset of 575 Italian manufacturing firms over the period 1992–1997, this paper finds a significant – although small – positive relationship between innovation and employment.