기업의 기술혁신 유형에 따른 고용효과 비교분석

초록

The question whether corporate technological innovations should displace employment or whether the technological innovations would have positive effects on the level of employment has been debated for over two centuries. The positive effect might be realized through the compensation mechanism in economic system. In this paper we analyze empirically the effects of the types of technological innovations on the employment level of the firm. To do so, we derive the dynamic employment model based on the CES production function which could have more flexible elasticity of substitution between labor and capital. To estimate the dynamic employment model which might reflect both the dynamic production process and employment adjustment process, this paper employs the Generalized Method of Moment methodology to control for the endogeneity of the lagged dependent variable and innovation variables. The endogeneity bias could be caused by the OLS estimation of the model which includes as regressors the lagged dependent variable and innovation variables which could affect employment reversely. To estimate the dynamic labor demand model, we set up a panel data by combining corporate financial data of the Korea Investors Service and technological innovation activity survey data implemented by the Science and Technology Policy Institute. Based on the panel data, we examine comparatively the employment effects of new product technological innovations and production process innovations in the dynamic labor demand framework. Empirical results show, first of all, that all estimated coefficients for the lagged dependent variable should be statistically significant from zero, which implies that the estimated dynamic employment model should be stable and the long-run elasticity of employment should be larger than the short-run elasticity. Second, the estimated coefficients for the capital per worker and real wage are found to be negative and statistically significant. This implies that if the firms use the capital per worker more efficiently, they would reduce employment level, rather than they would pay higher wage to workers. As expected, as the real wage rises, the firms would reduce employment in the short-run and the long-run as well. Third, the new product innovations are not significantly related with employment, but the production process innovations are positively associated with employment. As new products are replaced with old products, the employment effect of new product innovations would not be fully realized. Further, new product innovations appear to have a negative impact on employment. However, the estimated results are different depending on the size of firms. The employment effects of new product innovations and production process innovations are found to be more significant in the small and medium sized companies than the large-sized ones. The estimated coefficients for new product innovations are negative for big-sized companies but statistically insignificant, and positive and significant for small and medium sized companies. This means that technological innovations of small and medium sized enterprises(SMEs) might have positive impacts on creating employment, but those of large-sized companies might not have the affirmative impact. These results suggest that government subsidy for R&D activities to the SMEs should be relatively more effective in the expansion of employment in the firm level and macroeconomic level as well.

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