An established tenet of the literature is that the use of flexible labor leads to less innovation. Yet, less attention has been paid to the possibility that it is the decision to innovate that generates the incentive to hire on a permanent basis. The goal of this paper is to show the existence of interlocking complementarities between the firm's technological and hiring strategies. To do so, we develop a simple model where the workers’ decision to invest in human capital is affected by the type of employment contract (temporary versus permanent) and by the type of technological investments (routine versus innovative). When the firm is unable to coordinate its actions across these different domains, two equilibria simultaneously exist: in the ‘high-road’ equilibrium, firms invest more in innovative projects and hire on a permanent basis; in the ‘low-road’ equilibrium, they invest more in routine projects and hire on a temporary basis.

文献的一个既定原则是灵活劳动力的使用会导致创新减少。然而，很少有人注意到正是创新决定产生了长期雇用的动机。本文的目的是展示公司的技术和招聘策略之间存在连锁互补性。为此，我们开发了一个简单的模型，其中工人投资人力资本的决定受雇佣合同类型（临时与永久）和技术投资类型（常规与创新的）。当公司无法在这些不同领域协调其行动时，会同时存在两种均衡：在“高速路”均衡中，公司对创新项目进行更多投资并长期聘用；在“低路”均衡中，他们更多地投资于常规项目并临时雇用。