Documents Grinza, Elena 3 results

"Measuring the economic impact of coworkers from different countries of origin sparked intense scrutiny in labor economics, albeit with an uncomfortable methodological limitation. Most attempts involved metrics that eliminate most of the economically relevant distances among different countries of origin. The typical examples of such metrics are diversity indicators that divide the firm's workforce into blacks and whites, foreigners and natives, non-Europeans and Europeans, etc. We propose an entirely novel approach. It is based on the conversion of the qualitative information on individuals' countries of origin into an aggregate firm-level diversity indicator, built on the United Nations Development Programme's Human Development Index (HDI), a standard harmonized measure of cross-country variations that is available for virtually all the countries in the world. By resorting to rich matched employer-employee panel data for Belgium, we use this new aggregate measure to estimate state-of-the-art firm-level wage equations, which control for a wide range of observable and time-invariant unobservable factors, including variations in labor productivity between firms and within firms over time. Our results suggest that the majority of firms do not discriminate against foreigners. Yet, we find that firms with high diversity largely discriminate against them. The wage discrimination in high-diversity firms could be alleviated through a stronger presence of collective bargaining and/or efforts to de-cluster foreigners from low-HDI countries in these firms."

"We investigate the impact of sickness absenteeism on productivity by using rich longitudinal matched employer-employee data on Belgian private firms. We deal with endogeneity, which arises from unobserved firm heterogeneity and reverse causality, by applying a modified version of the Ackerberg et al's (2015) control function method, which explicitly removes firm fixed effects. Our main finding is that, in general, sickness absenteeism substantially dampens firm productivity. An increase of 1 percentage point in the rate of sickness absenteeism entails a productivity loss of 0.24%. Yet, we find that the impact is much diversified depending on the categories of workers who are absent and across different types of firms. Our results show that sickness absenteeism is detrimental mainly when absent workers are high-tenure or blue-collar workers. Moreover, they show that sickness absenteeism is harmful mostly to industrial firms, high capital-intensive companies, and small- and medium-sized enterprises. This overall picture is coherent with the idea that sickness absenteeism is problematic when absent workers embed high levels of firm/task-specific (tacit) knowledge, when the work of absent employees is highly interconnected with the work of other employees (e.g., along the assembly line), and when firms face more limitations in substituting temporarily absent workers."

"Using three waves of a representative survey of Italian private firms, the authors explore the impact of female managers on a firm's use of part-time work. Building on a literature that suggests female leaders display relatively more altruistic values compared to their male counterparts, the authors assess whether these differences manifest themselves in relation to working time arrangements offered by firms. Results, robust to controls for several time-varying firm-level characteristics and unobserved fixed firm heterogeneity, indicate that female managers are significantly more likely to limit the employment of involuntary part-time workers and correspondingly make greater use of full-time employees. Female managers also are more prone to grant part-time arrangements to employees who request them. Results also suggest that increasing the number of female business leaders may mitigate the problem of underemployment among involuntary part-time workers and contribute to the work–life balance of workers with child care or elder care activities."