Seminar: Dario Pozzoli, Aarhus School of Business, Aarhus University.

Title: Does Labour Diversity Affect Firm Performance?

Using a liked employer-employee dataset, we analyze how diversity in cultural background, skills and demo-graphic characteristics affects firm productivity and patenting behavior. Implementing structural estimation of the production function and count data models, we find evidence that all three dimensions of labor diver-sity signifficantly enhance firm performance even though it involves a cost in the short-run. Moreover, we find that larger shares of younger and high educated workers facilitate the exploitation of labor force heterogeneity in terms of productivity.