Innovation, employment and wages

Maria Savona’s seminar will be based on the results of the ESRC SDAI project (TEMPIS) on the effects of technological innovation on employment and self-employment in the UK’s local labour markets and on wage inequality.

The talk will start with an overview of the theoretical approaches that have dealt with technical change and employment, extending this to the effects of innovation on wage inequality. It will then show empirical evidence on the case of the UK Travel-To-Work-Areas, local labour markets before examining effects of firm R&D investments on the composition of employment and self-employment, as well as on between and within-firm wage inequality. Maria will close by discussing her team’s views on making innovation more inclusive at different levels of analysis.

About the speaker

Maria Savona is Professor of Innovation and Evolutionary Economics at the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex. She was previously at the University of Cambridge, as well as the Universities of Strasbourg and Lille. Her research focuses on the economics of innovation; the effects of technical change on employment and wage inequality; the structural change of the sectoral composition of economies, particularly the emergence of global value chains in services; economics and policy of innovation in services; barriers to innovation and innovation failures. More recently, she has been interested in policies to redistribute data-value.

She has led and co-led grants funded by the ESRC, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, EC H2020, IDRC. She has advised the IADB, ECLAC, UN ESCAP, OECD, NESTA, BEIS and DETI. She is an Editor for Research Policy and AE for the Journal of Evolutionary Economics. She is an Academic Member of the ESRC Peer Review College and on evaluation panels for the EC, and National Research Councils of Canada, Finland, Luxembourg, Italy, Norway, UK and US. She is a former member of the High Level Expert Group on the Impact of Digital Transformation on EU Labour Markets for the European Commission.

Please register on Eventbrite or contact complexity@inet.ox.ac.uk for more information.