UCLouvain Economics Seminar: Ariell Reshef

Techies, Trade and Skill-Biaised Productivity: Firm Level Evidence from France

Ariell Reshef, PSE

We study how firm level decisions on technolgy, exporting jointly affect the evolution of technology and its bias towards management occupations. We extend the Grieco, Li and Zhang (2016) methodology for estimating firm level productivity (revenue TFP) to encompass biased technology, and apply this to high quality administrative data on French firms. We use a novel measure of the propensity of a firm develop and to adopt new technologies: its expenditure share on employment of technology-related occupation, "techies". Our results indicate an important role for techies, as well as for global participation - but only through skill-biaised productivity growth.
(joint paper with James Harrigan and Farid Toubal)