Econ Papers Daily / 期刊论文
信任、无形资产与生产率
Trust, intangible assets, and productivity
摘要
Business environments dominated by information flows and autonomous tasks, typical of knowledge‐intensive industries, are likely to require enough social trust to be viable and productive. In this paper, we use new EUKLEMS & INTANProd industry‐level data covering a panel of 19 countries and 20 industries over the 1995–2018 period to investigate the influence of a key element of social capital – trust – on labor productivity in intangible‐intensive industries, controlling for hiring and firing regulations that can constrain the ability of managers to implement best practices productively. We find that in such industries, especially those intensive in organizational capital, productivity gains from high levels of trust are stronger than elsewhere, while too strict hiring and firing regulations are more damaging for productivity. Using a more limited sample for which data on management quality are available, we show that the positive impact of high trust on productivity in intangible‐intensive industries is channeled by the ability to benefit from good management, a key element of organizational capital. Productivity gains from relatively high levels of trust in knowledge‐rich environments are estimated to be sizable and our estimates survive instrumentation of potentially endogenous variables, inclusion of a wide range of controls, and several other robustness checks.
中文摘要
以信息流动和自主任务为主导的商业环境，典型存在于知识密集型产业中，这类环境很可能需要足够的社会信任才能维持运转并实现高效生产。本文利用涵盖1995—2018年期间19个国家、20个行业的EUKLEMS & INTANProd行业层面新数据，考察社会资本的一个关键要素——信任——对无形资本密集型产业劳动生产率的影响，并控制了可能制约管理者有效实施最佳实践的雇佣与解雇规制。我们发现，在此类产业中，尤其是组织资本密集型产业，高信任水平带来的生产率增益强于其他领域，而过于严格的雇佣与解雇规制对生产率的损害更大。利用一个可获得管理质量数据的较有限样本，我们表明，高信任对无形资本密集型产业生产率的正向影响，是通过从良好管理中获益的能力这一组织资本的关键要素来传导的。在知识丰富环境中，相对较高信任水平所带来的生产率增益估计相当可观，且我们的估计在经过潜在内生变量的工具变量处理、纳入广泛控制变量以及若干其他稳健性检验后依然成立。