The Effects of Technological Changes on the Iranian Manufacturing Industry Employment

In this paper, we investigate the effects of technological changes on employment in the Iranian manufacturing industries. We estimate an empirical relationship between R&D spending as a proxy of technological change and skiledl and unskilled employment across the manufacturing industries. We use the survey data on the four-digit large manufacturing industries for the period 1995-2000. In order to control for the heterogeneity among different industry groups, we use the multilevel model estimation. Our findings show a positive correlation of various measures of technology with the skill structure suggesting that technology is, on average, biased towards skilled labor. In other words, technological progress is complimentary with skilled labor and has a weak relation to unskilled employment in various activities.