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"Workforce skills and firm productivity"

Joana Cima, U. Minho 

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We study the relationship between workforce skills and firm's productivity using Portuguese data for the period 2006-2018. We use a multi-dimensional index that incorporates worker's education, age, and unobserved ability to measure workers' skill. The analysis shows that the average skill of the workforce is positively associated with productivity. However, we find a negative relationship between the dispersion of the workforce skills and the value-added per worker. We also estimate quantile regressions and observe that the positive association between average skill and productivity is increasing across the conditional productivity distribution, while the negative association with skill dispersion is stable."

 

 

"Who’s Got the Power? Wage Determination and its Resilience in the Great Recession”

 Hugo Vilares, LSE 

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Most OECD countries, with the exception of the Southern European countries, have witnessed remarkable increases in wage inequality. This paper develops and implements a dynamic search and matching model, where sector bargaining widely prevalent in Continental Europe is explicitly introduced. We use a comprehensive longitudinal employer-employee data on Portugal for the last two decades, and its defined collective bargaining rankings of workers. We find that wage determination has synchronized a notable stability of worker bargaining power at the bottom of the skill distribution, with a perennial erosion at the middle and the top. These trends led to wages becoming more reliant on sectoral bargaining, increasing its decoupling from firm productivity. This transition contributed to a compression of the wage distribution and to a downward trend of assortative matching in the market. These findings are resilient even in the context of the Great Recession, highlighting the importance of the labour market institutions and its dynamics in shaping wage inequality outcomes."

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"Firm-level Lab or Shares and Technology-driven Occupational Changes"

Ana Oliveira, U. Porto

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Technological advances have decreased labor demand for occupations with high routine task content and increased it for occupations that are either cognitively complex or require non-repetitive social interactions. Technology has also been one of the key drivers of the changes in the labor share of income. Our paper investigates whether the evolution of occupational employment shares and occupation-specific wage rates explains firm-level labor share dynamics. Using rich administrative data for Portugal, we show that the S-shaped dynamics of the aggregate labor share between 2004 and 2019 are mostly driven by changes in firms' labor share rather than valueadded reallocation across the labor share distribution. Our findings suggest that firmspecific labor shares rise due to positive growth in hourly wages, particularly high among Routine Manual and Non-Routine Manual occupations. We also show that changes in task group employment shares have limited effects on the firm-level labor shares, due to the stabilization of occupational employment shares since 2010.

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“Highway to health: primary adherence and health improvement”

Joana Gomes da Costa, U. Porto

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Adherence to medication is key to ensure recovery from illness, particularly in the context of chronic conditions in which an effective disease management is essential to prevent sudden deterioration of the individuals’ health and additional need for care. We hypothesize that patients with lower levels of adherence are more likely to see their health level deteriorate and require more intensive treatment. We are also interest in knowing whether the number and type of interaction with the physician, namely number of previous visits and whether the physician works in a public or private setting, influence clinical outcomes. We use a Fixed Effects Ordered Logit Model using a panel of patients’ prescriptions and dispensing events within the universe of all prescriptions and dispensing in Portugal from January 2015 to October 2019 (N=1.363.778). The individual prescription data are matched with individual, physician, prescription drug, pharmacy, and geographical characteristics, enabling controlling for a broad range of cofounders. We estimate that primary adherence to the prescribed medication increases the probability of controlling diabetes with monotherapeutic schemes, while decreasing the probability of transition to dual and triple therapy schemes