In our previous post, we announced that the preliminary results of our recent project investigating the relationship between wage inequality and firms’ innovation activity were presented at the University College London’s seminar. This time, Balázs Muraközy had the chance to introduce these results also to the audience of the annual conference of the American Economic Association, in Atlanta. The presentation was discussed by Stanford’s economist, Nick Bloom.

The American Economic Association is a learned society, with a history of more than 130 years and a membership of over 20.000 economists. As one of the most renowned economic institutes, the organization’s aim is to discuss and facilitate the development of economic research around the world. AEA’s journals are among the most influential academic papers of their kind, as measured by the journals’ impact factor, which is indicative of how outstanding a chance is to present at their conference.

Further, one of our team members, Attila Lindner, has also had the privilege to organize a complete section of this year’s conference. He was responsible for the Innovation and Inequality: The Role of Firms section, which also featured Balázs’s presentation.

The presentation discussed ways in which it is possible to define the innovation activities of firms and the way in which these definitions affect our understanding of innovation’s impact on wage inequality within firms. One of the paper’s novelty is that, aside from innovation resulting from R&D activity, it also investigates the effect of low- and high-novelty innovation types by analysing firm-level microdata. Our results indicate that both the number of workers with tertiary educated and their wage increases in consequences of innovation activity by the firm, regardless of the innovation’s type. The presentation can be viewed here.