Pesquisa e Planejamento Econômico, volume 46 | número 2 | agosto 2016

Skilled labor mobility and innovation: a study of Brazilian microregions

Eduardo Gonçalves, Danielle Reis de Souza Ribeiro, Ricardo da Silva Freguglia

Resumo


A stylized fact in the labor mobility literature, especially for skilled workers, is that they are characteristically a means of knowledge transfer from one region to another. However, research on innovation has hardly explored the role of skilled human capital mobility. This paper mainly aims to verify the extent to which innovation in the Brazilian microregions is related to skilled labor migration, as well as to know how attracting qualified labor is influenced by innovation levels. For this, estimates were performed by means of simultaneous equation systems using the SUR, 2SLS and 3SLS methods. Two innovation measures were then used: patents per capita and industrial manufacturing value. The results suggest that there was simultaneity between innovation and skilled labor migration. This paper also presents an Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis (ESDA) on migration and innovation, which show the existence of spatial clusters.

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