Congratulations to Dr. Marianna Marino for obtaining her PhD!

Abstract

The thesis is a work on diversity, knowledge transfers and economics outcomes.

Specifically, the first chapter of this thesis contributes to the existing debate on firm formation and entrepreneurship by studying weather the exposure to heterogeneous co-workers induces individuals to start a new business. It looks at labor diversity along three dimensions: cultural background, demographics and education. The empirical analysis shows that workforce educational diversity promotes entrepreneurial behavior of employees as well as the formation of new firms, whereas diversity in demographics hinders transitions to self-employment. Ethnic diversity favors entrepreneurship in financial and business services. This chapter has been published by Economics Letters in 2012.

The second chapter focuses on a research question, which is intimately related to the former one: does parental cultural diversity affect children’s propensity to become self-employed? We explore the ethnic diversity of the family, which can be seen as the main locus in which learning opportunities take place. We study a sample of second-generation immigrants in Denmark. The study shows that cultural diversity of parents is related to higher likelihood to start a new business for children. This effect is stronger for individuals with no siblings and with at least a parent with tertiary education.

The third chapter explores the role played by educational diversity of co-workers in favoring knowledge transfers and eventually in determining firm productivity enhancements when individuals change workplace. This article contributes to the literature on knowledge transfer via labor mobility by tracing worker flows between firms in Denmark over the period 1995-2005, and studying weather workers who have been previously exposed to educationally diverse coworkers enhance productivity of hiring firms. The results of the empirical tests show that knowledge carried by those mobile workers has a significant and positive impact on the productivity of hiring firms. Several robustness checks support this finding and show that insignificant effects are associated with the prior exposure of newly hired employees to either demographic or culturally diverse workplaces.

The fourth chapter analyzes the link between product market regulation and labor market outcomes of different skill groups. By using publicly available data on product market regulation indicators, collected by the OECD, and number of worked hours and wage bill shares for high, medium and low skilled workers, from the EU-KLEMS database, I find that product market regulation is associated to lower number of worked hours and wage bill shares for high and medium skilled workers. Moreover, after controlling for the role played by international trade dynamics and employment protection legislations, it seems that regulation is also related to higher wage bill shares for low skilled workers. This would help to explain the widening wage gap between different skill groups and the increasing wage inequality along the wage distribution, which occurred during the last decades among many OECD countries.