Job flows are typically defined on the basis of the employment changes at the plant level. When calculated in this way, the job creation rate was 22.4% and destruction rate 23.8% in the Finnish business sector in the four-year period 2000-2004. However, when the different occupations (using...

Analyses in this paper do not support the idea that job and worker flows have become more intensive and have deteriorated working conditions in the Finnish business sector. The magnitude of flow has in fact been rather stable since 1997. However, job flows are at a quite high level, as some 10%...

This paper reviews the characteristics and magnitude of information technology (IT) outsourcing as well as studies its labor productivity effects with a representative sample of Finnish businesses. Depending on the IT task in question, on average from one-third to two-thirds of IT has been...

We examine the sources and micro-level mechanisms of the changes in the labor share of value added. We link the micro-level dynamics of the labor share change with that of productivity and wage growth. Using a useful variant of the decomposition method we make a distinction between the change in...

We make several findings related to the dynamics of labour markets and industry life cycles in our analysis, which makes use of longitudinal employer-employee data that cover the whole working age population in Finland. Firstly, we find that across industry transitions of the employed are...

The use of traditional industry-level profitability indicators for assessing the state of competition is problematic for two reasons. First, short-term variation reflects business cycles more than it does the impact of competition policy. Second, rough industry-level indicators hide different...

This paper explores the effects of outsourcing on employee well-being through the use of the Finnish linked employer-employee data. The direct negative effect of outsourcing is attributable to greater job destruction and worker outflow. In terms of perceived well-being, the winners in...

This paper studies how firms contribute to the productivity growth of an industry over their lifecycle. We present a decomposition method that allows us to condition the components of productivity growth on the age of production units. We find evidence for a prolonged positive exit effect that...

We assess Finland’s competitiveness in the light of various, mainly short-term indicators. It turns out that the weak export market performance over the last few years is linked to the deterioration of profitability of production in Finland. A better export and employment performance requires...

Radical innovations require risk-taking. However, it is hard to find an objective measure for innovation investments that would take riskiness into account. In this paper, we investigate how a simple measure of firms’ innovation investments, namely the employee share of managers and...