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Innovation, Industry Evolution, and Employment. Edited by David B. Audretsch and Roy Thurik, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, vii + 321 pp. ISBN 0521641667.
This book contains 13 essays that have as their common denominator the empirical investigation of industrial organization questions using international data sets. The countries represented in the book range from the United States to Burundi. The topics covered also span a fairly broad spectrum. Indeed, the book's title could easily have been, Innovation, Industry Evolution, Employment, Wages and Productivity. Thus, few scholars are likely to be interested in every essay in the volume. Nevertheless, the essays are of an almost uniformly high standard, and any economist interested in applied questions in the industrial organization and labor economics areas will find several chapters in this book of interest. Moreover, the papers focus upon a set of questions that have only recently been taken up by applied micro-economists. Thus, it is not an exaggeration to say that the papers collected here lie on the frontier of applied microeconomics research today. I shall briefly discuss each paper to give the reader a flavor of the contents of the book.
Following an introductory chapter by the editors are two chapters analyzing the determinants of wages. Bee Yan Aw and Geeta Batra use data for 80,584 Taiwanese manufacturing companies to investigate wage patterns across companies. In contrast to several studies of the United States, they do not find a strong positive correlation between the wages of production workers and firm size in Taiwan, although this correlation does appear for non-production workers. The wage profiles for production workers are also flatter in companies that are active in exporting. On average exporters also pay higher wages to their employees.
John Baldwin and Mohammed Refiquzzaman also find that wages of production workers and the salaries of non-production workers in exporting companies in Canada are significantly higher than in non-exporting companies. Exporting companies also have adopted the newer technologies to a significantly greater degree. Thus, the higher...