Documents productivity 774 results

"This study analyses firms' adjustment behaviour when facing higher labour costs. The empirical research design considers several outcomes, and exploits, as a source of variation in labour costs, discontinuities in the growth of contractual wages set by Italian collective bargaining institutions. The results indicate that adjustment channels are highly heterogeneous across the firms' productivity distribution. Employment, revenue, productivity and the profit margin are negatively related to contractual wage growth among relatively less efficient companies. Instead, most efficient firms do not downsize, they substitute high-wage workers with low-wage workers while preserving their productivity, and they may even increase (or at least keep constant) their profitability. We conclude that more efficient companies, which adjust through cost-saving and labour-hoarding strategies, may benefit from cleansing effects, as their product market shares increase when costs of more constrained rivals are raised."

This work is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

"This paper presents a growth model with two sectors. In the high-tech sector, R&D increases productivity and union–firm bargaining determines wages, but in the traditional sector there are neither R&D nor labour unions. The government is able to regulate union bargaining power. The main results are as follows. Because firms try to escape wage increases through the improvement of productivity by R&D, the increase in union bargaining power boosts R&D and growth. It is welfare enhancing to strengthen (weaken) unions when the growth rate is below (above) some critical level. A specific rule is presented for when de-unionization is socially desirable."

"This paper identifies public investment as an efficient and significant tool for addressing the issue of the widening productivity gap between the EU and its main trading partners. Specifically, the paper estimates the impact of net public investment growth on net private investment growth and non-agricultural private sector labour productivity growth, excluding the real estate sector. Results suggest that an ambitious public investment strategy might be able to steer private investment and boost productivity growth. Additionally, the paper assesses whether the debt sustainability analysis (DSA) framework employed by the European Commission would allow the implementation of an ambitious public investment programme or impose constraints, instead. The structure of the DSA framework suffers from four fundamental flaws: (i) the estimation of potential output merely replicates national account identities; (ii) the output gap is inefficient in capturing inflationary dynamics and hysteresis effects; (iii) investment in general, and public investment in particular, is undermined in the DSA framework; and (iv) the fiscal multipliers assumed by the European Commission are unrealistically small. Given these flaws, the DSA framework ought to be re-contextualised in order to support the implementation of a public investment strategy."

"Over the last two decades, total factor productivity (TFP) in Italy decreased by 0.2% per year, while increasing on average in the Euro-area countries. This decline suggests the existence of large inefficiencies in the allocation of resources, making the Italian case particularly interesting and suitable in order to study the role of misallocation. In this article, I quantify the within-industry misallocation of inputs in Italy over the period 1993–2011, by applying the Hsieh and Klenow's methodology. Using a micro-level longitudinal dataset of Italian manufacturing firms, I find that, in the hypothetical absence of distortions, aggregate TFP in manufacturing would be boosted by 58% in 1993, by 67% in 2006 and by 80% in 2011. This leads to a twofold conclusion: first, misallocation plays a crucial role in determining the inefficiency level of the Italian manufacturing sector; second, misallocation has increased over time. Given the magnitude of the results obtained and the policy implications related thereto, I take a step ahead by checking to what extent the degree of misallocation can be attributed to specific characteristics of the Italian firms: it emerges that misallocation is higher for firms located in the south and at low-technological intensity, as well as for small or young firms."

"There is a rising interest in both skills policy and industrial policy in OECD countries following the economic downturn. But how can skills policy best support industrial growth? In the UK, the coalition government is arguing for an industrial policy which is bottom-up, supporting networks of employers and helping to build productive local supply chains. There is simultaneous investment in a more ‘employer-led' skills policy, in order to better tackle skills shortages and gaps. But is an employer-led skills policy the best way of boosting industrial growth in all UK regions? Are there potential market failures in employer-led policies of which the public sector should be aware? This article warns against taking an overly simplistic approach to skills development, arguing that while skills policies should be flexible to the needs of employers, there is still justification for investing in a broad educational curriculum at the local level. Further, policy-makers may need proactively to help employers to better use skills in some regions in order to boost productivity and growth."