Holger Alda - SOFI

4
Globalization, Technological Change and the socio-economic Profiles of
West German Firms in the year 2004
– a socio-economic firm typology based on linked employer-employee data and
analyses of its determinants –
Abstract
Changes of employment and work are often suggested to be linked to the globalization of sale
and product markets. More differentiated value added chains change the structure of firms’
employment and work as well as organizational and technological change does. The paper
asks what typical combinations of firms’ socio-economic outcomes arise and whether and
how they are determined by competitive economic activities on firm level.
A socio-economic firm typology is introduced in order to describe the within-profile of West
German firms in terms of wages, job stability, and firms’ skill structure showing typical
socio-economic chances and risks of West German employees in the year 2004. The empirical
results show that much of the nowadays discussed shaping of employment and work is
obvious, but its meaning for the (national) economic system and social model seems to be
sometimes overestimated.
Beyond the descriptive analyses, multinominal logit regressions identify the determinants of
several firm types focussing on nowadays competitive aspects of firms’ economic activities.
Globalization for example is reflected by investigating the effects of foreign ownership and
export shares on firm level on the (predicted) incidence ratios of firm types. Technological
change is measured via the firms’ offer of E-Learning combined with the investments in
information and communication technology (ITC).
The simulations show that globalization promotes observing an increasing number of high
wage firms and – to a lower extent – also low wage firms, while the incidence ratios of firms
with a traditional fordistic work organization become lower. Technological change increases
not only the likelihood of observing more high wage firms, but also of fordistic firms, while
with firms’ higher investments in ITC the likelihood of observing low wage firms decreases.
JEL-Codes: C21, D21, D31, J21, J23, J31, J63, L22, L25, M51