Weaker jobs, weaker innovation. Exploring the effects of temporary employment on new products

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.