Marie Le Mouel, Mariagrazia Squicciarini
Research on the role of Knowledge-Based Capital (KBC) as a key driver of firm performance, especially as a complementary and enabling asset for other investments, has burgeoned in recent years and has contributed to making significant progress in the measurement of resources devoted by firms to KBC. The expenditure based approach of Corrado,Hulten and Sichel (2005, 2009, hereafter CHS) has been widely adopted across OECD countries. Such an approach relies on the economics and management literature, where knowledge assets can be seen as embedded in a firm's employees. The present paper seeks to quantify the human resources devoted to KBC by looking at the task content ofoccupations. To do so, it builds on previous work by the authors that uses the Occupational Information Network (O*NET) data from the United States Department of Labor to estimate organisation capital. The methodoly is here extended in two directions. Firstly, the same database is used to identify workers who contribute to the creation and accumulationof four KBC asset types: Organisational Capital, Research and Development, Computerised Information and Design. Results suggest that there is a large overlap between these assets, as they tend to be associated with similar workers. Secondly, the OECD database from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) is used to test whether the results derived using the ONET databse can be generalised to a set of OECD countries. Results suggest that occupational categories seem to be associatedwith the performance of distinct tasks at the international level.
Keywords: Knowledge-based capital, organisational capital, embeddedness, tasks, Occupational Network Information (O*NET), OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC)
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