The Impact of technology and demand shocks on structural dynamics: evidence from Austrian manufacturing

This paper examines the link between structural change between and within industries. We analyse the influence of sector specific developments in productivity and demand on net entry and employment in 19 industrial sectors of the Austrian economy. Based on the model of structural dynamics of Pasinetti, we develop an identification scheme that allows us to extract technology and demand shocks, by means of a structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) model with long-run restrictions. We study the patterns of productivity and demand shocks across industries by means of a principal components analysis and find that sectoral and macro-economic developments in demand strongly correlate, while this is not the case for technology shocks. Impulse-response analysis shows that for almost all sectors productivity growth rates experience an immediate increase to positive technology shocks while the hours worked decline as conjectured by Pasinetti. Finally, we use the identified shocks as explanatory variables in time- series cross section regressions on net-entry and employment data. Both types of shocks are able to explain dynamics on the industry level in terms of employment and sales but not firm dynamics.