Previous empirical literature has shown that technological change can be considered the main cause of the skill bias (increase in the number of high skilled workers) exhibited by manufacturing employment in developed countries over the last decades. However, recent papers have also introduced the “Skill Biased Organisational Change ” hypothesis. We estimate a SUR model for a sample of 400 Italian manufacturing firms, showing that the upskilling is more a function of the reorganisational strategy than a consequence of technological change alone. Moreover, some evidence of superadditive effects emerges, consistently with the theoretical hypothesis of a coevolution of technology and organisation.

Policy makers must choose from a vast and diverse set of policy instruments when stimulating innovation in low-carbon energy technologies is a goal. Drawing on earlier debates in the economics of innovation, energy technology studies frequently distinguish between “demand pull,” government actions that enlarge the market for a new technology, and “technology push,” those that influence the supply of new knowledge. While many have criticized the reduction of the complex process of innovation to two causal factors, the notion per se that policy can induce investment—and consequent improvements—in technologies by creating markets for them enjoys support from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. This paper uses the case of wind power in California from 1975 to 2001 to evaluate this hypothesis. Both the California state and U.S. federal governments implemented several demand-side policies relevant to wind power. By increasing the profitability of wind power, these incentives stimulated rapid investment in and diffusion of the technology. They also provided opportunities for important incremental improvements in the technology through learning-by-using. Demand created by these policies was less effective in stimulating inventive activity, as measured with patents; patenting activity declined as investment in new wind power development increased during the mid-1980s. Analysis of the most frequently cited patents shows that their decline during that period is almost entirely attributable to a precipitous drop in patents that provided alternatives to the increasingly dominant 3-blade, upwind, horizontal-axis design.

Innovations and industrial renewal in Finland-

The history of the Sfinno-project can be traced back to the founding of the VTT Group for Technology Studies in 1992. One of the first projects of the group aspired to systematically collect data on the development and commercialisation of innovations in order to establish a good micro-level database on technological change in Finnish industry. The idea was to dig deeper into the rapid industrial renewal of the 1980s, when the electronics industry emerged as the third pillar of the Finnish economy alongside the forestry and metal industries. Moreover, the project aimed at providing more concrete innovation indicators capturing innovation output as a complement to R&D statistics and macro-level indicators. Due to the increasing scale and scope of the group’s activities, the first phase of data collection was undertaken with limited resources alongside various other and more urgent obligations. In May 1997 the project was revitalised through financial support of Tekes, and this report is a first descriptive analysis of the data that has been collected in a more systematic way since 1998. Although the basic aims of the project have remained the same, the database now has the sufficient critical mass

This Discussion Paper is issued within the framework of IZA’s research area The Future of Labor. Any opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and not those of the institute. Research disseminated by IZA may include views on policy, but the institute itself takes no institutional policy positions. The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent, nonprofit limited liability company (Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung) supported by Deutsche Post World Net. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its research networks, research support, and visitors and doctoral programs. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. The current research program deals with (1) mobility and flexibility of labor, (2) internationalization of labor markets, (3) welfare state and labor market, (4) labor markets in transition countries, (5) the future of labor, (6) evaluation of labor market policies and projects and (7) general labor economics.