Using a 16-year employer-employee panel dataset that contains the entire population of firms and workers in Argentina, this paper provides evidence of the benefits of public support for firm-level innovation for the firms that received support, the workers who were employed by them, and the firms that hired beneficiary workers. The results confirm that participant firms improve their performance and generate valuable productive knowledge, which spills over to workers who directly participated in the program and is diffused through labour mobility to other firms. The worker-level results show that workers exposed to innovation projects receive higher wages. High-skilled workers receive most of the benefits from exposure to innovation, and the wage premium is higher for workers who moved to other firms. At the firm level, the paper provides evidence that hiring workers previously exposed to innovation projects is associated with an increase in firm performance. The findings suggest that labour mobility is an important mechanism for transmitting knowledge between firms.

Do cluster development programs work? Do they fundamentally encourage the essential inter-firm linkages and coordination? Do they lead to innovation and productivity, enterprise development, larger employment, and export growth, and if so, after how long? Do other firms benefit from these programs? This book offers insight into quantitative methods that help answer these questions. Cluster development is a form of modern industrial policy that is spreading across the world to help exploit the externalities emerging from geographical agglomeration and inter-firm coordination. Therefore, rigorous impact evaluations are necessary because they help policymakers understand better ways to design future programs and provide accountability for public resources. The chapters argue that enterprise clusters and the programs to support them are diverse and multidimensional processes that require a variety of instruments to be fully understood and assessed. The book as a whole gathers various methodological essays and quantitative tests of complementary tools and approaches, emphasizing their usefulness and effectiveness in coordination with one another. Most importantly, it asserts that policy evaluation is crucial, in particular when it comes to cluster development programs, to ensure the best use of public resources, the accountability of beneficiaries, and most of all to feed the necessary learning to improve the design and implementation of public policies for enterprise development.

We estimate the effects of knowledge spillovers on firms’ performance and workers’ wages. We use an innovation support program as an exogenous shock to the knowledge of non-participant firms and an employer-employee dataset to track the mobility of workers—and knowledge diffusion—between firms. We find that non-participants that acquired new knowledge by hiring skilled workers exposed to the program increased employment, the average wage they pay, exports, and productivity. Finally, we find that—depending on the level of competition—a wage premium was paid either by participant or non-participant firms to retain or acquire workers.

En este trabajo se estiman los efectos directos e indirectos del apoyo recibido por productores de tecnologías de la información y la comunicación (TIC) ubicados en la ciudad de Córdoba, entre los años 2003 y 2007 en el marco del Programa de Desarrollo de Cadenas Productivas de la Provincia de Córdoba. Para estimar el efecto indirecto se consideran dos enfoques complementarios: externalidades asociadas a la movilidad laboral y externalidades asociadas a la proximidad geográfica. La estimación del efecto directo e indirecto se realizó usando un modelo de efectos aleatorios en los cuales el sesgo de selección se controla mediante la introducción de rezagos de las variables de resultado. El modelo se sustenta en el supuesto de que las empresas observan su desempeño pasado para tomar la decisión de participar o no del programa. Se encuentra que el impacto directo e indirecto fue positivo y significativo tanto sobre las ventas como sobre el empleo, los salarios y las exportaciones.

This article evaluates the effect of the Argentinean Support Program for Organizational Change on employment and wages. The program aimed at increasing small and medium-sized enterprises' competitiveness by co-financing technical assistance to support process and product innovation activities. Although employment is not usually the main objective of these types of programs, they are always implemented assuming that they create-or at least do not destroy-employment opportunities. We use a unique data set with information for the population of firms in Argentina from 1996 to 2008 to test this important assumption. Using a combination of fixed effects and matching, we find that both process and product innovation support increased employment and wages, with a higher impact on employment. In addition, we find that product innovation support had a larger effect on wages than process innovation support.

Although knowledge spillovers are at the core of the innovation policy's justification, they have never been properly measured by any impact evaluation. This paper fills this gap by estimating the spillover effects of the FONTAR program in Argentina. We use an employer-employee matched panel dataset with the entire population of firms and workers in Argentina for the period 2002-2010. This dataset allows us to track the mobility of qualified workers from FONTAR beneficiary firms to other firms and, therefore, to identify firms that indirectly benefit from the program through knowledge diffusion. We use a combination of fixed effect and matching to estimate the causal effect-direct and indirect-of the program on various measures of performance. Our findings are robust to a placebo test based on anticipatory effects and show that the program increased employment, wages, and the exporting probability of both direct and indirect beneficiaries. The analysis of the dynamic of these effects confirms that performance does not improve immediately after the treatment for neither direct nor indirect beneficiaries.

This paper presents the evaluation of the Enterprise Restructuring Support Program in Argentina. The aim of the program was to increase the competitiveness of small and medium-sized enterprises by cofinancing technical assistance that can be classified as either support for process innovation or support for product innovation. Although these types of programs do not primarily aim to create jobs, they are implemented assuming that they do, or at least that they do not destroy jobs. This paper tests this assumption. It compares the impact of each type of support on employment and the type of employment measured by the wages paid by firms to their employees. To control for self-selection into the program, propensity score matching and difference in differences were combined. The study found that by supporting both process and product innovation-related activities, the program was able to create more and better jobs. The effect on wages was also found to be higher when supporting product innovation activities.

One of the characteristic features of labor markets in Latin America in general and Argentina in particular is inequality. The inequality that arises between men and women is one of the most important aspects of this. This article aims to show one of the most significant characteristics of the inequity of Argentina’s labor market—gender wage gaps—and identify the causes of these gaps, in order to contribute to the debate on policies for equal opportunities for men and women. We also reflect on the role labor institutions are playing with regard to gender inequality, particularly the effect of collective labor agreements on gender wage gaps at the firm level.

This paper evaluates the impact of the Argentine SME support program PRE on employment, real wages, and exports. The program aimed at increasing the competitiveness of SMEs by co-financing up to fifty percent of expenditures in professional services and technical assistance. We use a unique panel dataset constructed with administrative records. We combine Propensity Score Matching and Difference in Differences methods to control for selection biases in the estimations. We find a positive and quantitatively important impact of the program on employment and a positive although smaller impact on real wages and the probability of exporting. We also find that the effect of the program on wages and the probability of exporting take place one year after beneficiaries receive the program. The effect of the program on employment takes place one, two, and even, three years after beneficiaries receive the program.

Este trabajo analiza la magnitud y el tipo de movilidad del empleo registrado en Argentina desde mediados del decenio de 1990. La fuente de datos utilizada es el Observatorio de Empleo y Dinamica Empresarial del Ministerio de Trabajo y Seguridad Social de Argentina, construido a partir de registros administrativos de la seguridad social que dan cuenta del empleo asalariado registrado privado, en la industria, el comercio y los servicios. Esa categoria ocupacional, sin embargo, fue minoritaria (25%) en la estructura del empleo de Argentina en el periodo. El principal resultado obtenido fue la medicion de una elevada movilidad laboral. El articulo muestra que en el periodo estudiado, que se caracterizo por la inestabilidad macroeconomica y por elevados costos laborales en dolares, el patron de movilidad laboral predominante de los trabajadores registrados fue hacia la exclusion del mercado de trabajo formal (desocupacion, inactividad u ocupacion en puestos no registrados).

This paper analyses the magnitude and type of employment mobility found in Argentina from the mid-1990s onward using data from the Observatorio de Empleo y Dinámica Empresarial (Employment and Business Dynamics Observatory) of the Ministry of Labour and Social Security of Argentina. The Observatory was developed using social security records of registered private-sector wage employment in the manufacturing, commerce and services sectors. Such employment, however, played a minor role (25%) in the employment structure of Argentina during the period studied. The main finding of this study was a significant level of labour mobility. This article shows that, during the period in question, which was characterized by macroeconomic instability and high dollar labour costs, the dominant labour mobility trend among registered workers was toward exclusion from the formal labour market (through unemployment, inactivity or employment in jobs not registered with the social security system).

Resumen La deficiencia de informacion y conocimiento acerca de la estructura productiva argentina afecta seriamente la calidad de las decisiones publicas y privadas en materia economica y social. De ello surgio la necesidad de generar un Observatorio de Empleo y Dinamica Empresarial en Argentina. Los objetivos principales apuntan a aliviar esas falencias en tres niveles: · generar un sistema de informacion que integre un conjunto de indicadores para el analisis estructural y dinamico del empleo y de las empresas; · presentar informes y estudios especiales que seran desarrollados por equipos de investigacion propios; · desarrollar instrumentos para la difusion y la interaccion con el publico usuario. Estos niveles de accion se complementan para lograr una apropiada gestion de la informacion creando, asimismo, los canales adecuados para su transmision a los encargados de la toma de decisiones.