Olga Kuzmina and her co-author Catherine Thomas, Professor at The London School of Economics and Political Science, in their study analyze how employment contracts impact different types of innovations in the company. Applying data of Spanish companies, they found out that short-term agreements with employees enable firms to better cope with demand shocks and produce more innovations, on the whole. On another hand, this growth in innovations results from more simple adaptive or outsourced innovations implementation rather than from frontier ones. This finding show how important this is to invest into human capital and to motivate the stuff by long-term employment contracts.
The European Summer Symposium is organized by the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) and hosted by the Study Center Gerzensee. The event traditionally brings together the best economists from all over the world.