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• Focus on new digital technologies: very uneven diffusion among Italian firms displaying different adoption behaviours. • Analysis of the technology adoption choices made by individual firms exploring the nexus between technology, skills and the organisation of work. • Application of probit and zero inflated poisson models to estimate the probability of introducing at least one technology and the total number of new digital technologies. • In continuity with previous studies of ICTs: strong complementarities between skills and new technologies. • Results point to the importance of knowledge accumulation embodied in firm employees and techno-organizational capabilities of firms. New digital technologies are shaping the transformation of production activities. This process of change is characterised by growing digitization, inter-connectivity and automation. The diffusion of new technologies is, however, very uneven, and firms display different adoption behaviours. By using data on a representative sample of Italian firms, we explore the patterns and determinants of new digital technology adoption. We build our theoretical framework on the nexus between technology, skills and the organisation of work. We then provide novel econometric evidence on the positive effects of education and training. Among the notable results of the paper, labour flexibility does not seem to favour new technology adoption, whereas second-level collective bargaining plays a positive role in the process. Results also show heterogeneous effects between large vs. small and medium-size firms, and between manufacturing and service sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New digital technologies can generate substantial gains for adopting businesses. In this paper we analyse the impact of new technologies associated with the Industry 4.0 paradigm on labour productivity, average wages and sales growth. The analysis is based on microdata produced by the Italian National Institute for the Analysis of Public Policies (INAPP) on a large representative sample of Italian firms. We merge INAPP data with Orbis data covering the period 2010–2014-2018. By applying a Diff-in-Diff methodology, we show that the economic size of the effect of new technologies on productivity and sales is approximately twice as large as the effect on average wages. The positive impact is stronger for small and medium-size firms, even though the effects appear to be concentrated among more mature rather than younger firms and are heterogeneaous along the distributions. Results are robust to unobserved heterogeneity and endogeneity issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following a market-oriented approach, policies aimed at increasing labour flexibility by weakening employment protection institutions should enable firms to efficiently allocate resources, improve their capability to compete on international markets and adjust to economic cycle. This work documents the rise of non-standard (i.e. temporary and part-time) work in five European countries (Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom) over the period 1994–2016 and investigates the nexus between the use of non-standard work and innovation performance using data for 18 manufacturing and 23 service industries. Contrary to the objectives that market-oriented policy recommendations promised to achieve, we show that there is a significantly negative association between the share of workers employed under non-standard contractual arrangements and the introduction of both product and process innovation. Furthermore, we show that the harmful consequences of the spread of non-standard work on firms' product innovation propensity are more pronounced in high-tech sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New technologies can shape the production process by affecting the way in which inputs are embedded in the organization, their quality, and their use. Using an original employer-employee dataset that merges firm-level data on digital technology adoption and other characteristics of production with employee-level data on worker entry and exit rates from the administrative archive of the Italian Ministry of Labor, this paper explores the effects of new digital technologies on labor flows in the Italian economy. Using a Difference-in-Difference approach, we show that digital technologies lead to an increase in the firm-level hiring rate – particularly for young workers - and reduce the firm-level separation rate. We also find that digital technologies are positively associated with workplace training, proxied by the share of trained employees and the amount of training costs per employee. Furthermore, we explore the heterogeneity of effects related to different technologies (robots, cybersecurity and IoT). Our results are confirmed through several robustness checks. • Effects of new digital technologies on labor flows in the Italian economy. • Digital technologies positively affect hiring rate of young workers. • Firm-level adoption of digital technologies reduce firm-level separation rate. • Digital technologies positively associated with workplace training. • Heterogeneity of effects of robots, cybersecurity and IoT on job flows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work explores the relationship between temporary employment and product innovation focusing on five major European economies (France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands) observed between 1998 and 2012. The analysis distinguishes sectors according to their technological characteristics and regimes finding that industries using temporary employment tend to have a weaker product innovation propensity. The negative correlation between temporary employment and innovation turns out to be stronger in those sectors where tacit firm's specific knowledge is crucial to the development of innovations. These sectors are identified using both the 'Cumulativeness' proxy stemming from Peneder's classification as well as distinguishing between different Schumpeterian regimes – Schumpeter Mark I vs. II – of knowledge accumulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

La autora se centra en la polarización del empleo y proporciona evidencia para explicar los patrones de variación ocupacional sobre la base de cuatro macrogrupos de la CIUO según el nivel de calificación. Adoptando un enfoque estructural y sectorial, y mediante un análisis shift-share, pone de relieve diferencias entre las manufacturas y los servicios, así como entre países. La polarización se observa más bien en los servicios, y en algunos países europeos conduce a rechazar la teoría del sesgo del cambio tecnológico hacia el trabajo calificado. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]