• Media type: Report; E-Book
  • Title: Complementarities among types of education in affecting firms' productivity
  • Contributor: Bolli, Thomas [Author]; Pusterla, Filippo [Author]
  • imprint: Zurich: ETH Zurich, KOF Swiss Economic Institute, 2018
  • Language: English
  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000313509
  • Keywords: J24 ; L25 ; diversity ; productivity ; complementarity ; education
  • Origination:
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  • Description: This paper uses Swiss firm-level panel data to estimate how complementarities among workers with different types of education affect firms' productivity. We subdivide workers by education into four groups: no post-secondary education, upper secondary vocational education and training (VET), tertiary professional education, and tertiary academic education. To account for possible endogeneity, we exploit within- firm variation and employ a recent structural estimation technique that uses intermediate inputs as a proxy for unobserved productivity shocks. Our results suggest that workers with an upper secondary VET education are complementary to workers with a tertiary academic education, while workers with no post-secondary education are complementary to workers with a tertiary professional education. In terms of firm characteristics, the results are surprisingly similar for low- and high-tech industries. Service industries, particularly modern ones, show both higher substitutability and higher complementarity, depending on the combination of workers. Large-size firms also show higher levels of substitutability and complementarity.
  • Access State: Open Access