Documents Cirillo, Valeria 11 results

"How and to what extent does organized labour contribute to shaping firms' competitive strategies by fostering innovation and investments in R&D? Drawing on insights from evolutionary theories and industrial relations studies, this paper empirically investigates how firm-level collective bargaining impacts firms' investments in intangible assets, including R&D. The paper underlines how in the workplace context, where workers and managers pursue conflicting interests, the presence of a strong trade union able to bargain can empower workers' voice and persuade management to invest in innovation related assets rather than compete through cost cutting strategies. We leverage a comprehensive and representative survey of Italian non-agricultural companies conducted by the National Institute for Public Policy Analysis to test these predictions. Baseline estimates indicate that firm-level bargaining, particularly in highly unionized firms, is linked to investments in R&D and other intangibles. Further analysis suggests that work organization clauses are key drivers of this positive relationship."

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

"New technologies can shape the production process by affecting the way in which inputs are embedded in the organization, their quality, and their use. Using an original employer-employee dataset that merges firm-level data on digital technology adoption and other characteristics of production with employee-level data on worker entry and exit rates from the administrative archive of the Italian Ministry of Labor, this paper explores the effects of new digital technologies on labor flows in the Italian economy. Using a Difference-in-Difference approach, we show that digital technologies lead to an increase in the firm-level hiring rate – particularly for young workers - and reduce the firm-level separation rate. We also find that digital technologies are positively associated with workplace training, proxied by the share of trained employees and the amount of training costs per employee. Furthermore, we explore the heterogeneity of effects related to different technologies (robots, cybersecurity and IoT). Our results are confirmed through several robustness checks."

"The decentralization of wage-setting – from multi-employer bargaining to firm-level agreements – allows firms to adjust their internal wage structure but has uncertain effects on inequality. This article estimates the difference in within-firm wage inequality between centralized and firm-level bargaining. Exploiting employer–employee earnings data over 2006–18 for Belgium, Czechia, France, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom, we compare various bargaining traditions over a period of economic change. The findings defy simple classifications of national bargaining systems: the difference in inequality between firm-level and centralized bargaining varies considerably across and within countries and there is no common time trend."

"The dramatic impact of the 2008 crisis on the Italian economy led to policy responses including structural reforms and labour market liberalisation to reverse the worrisome output and employment trends. A key action by the Italian government, the evocatively named Jobs Act of 2014, has deeply changed Italian industrial relations. The Jobs Act has introduced a new contract type that substantially limits workers' rights to reinstatement in case of fi rms invalidly fi ring them. This article frames the Jobs Act within the overall liberalisation process begun in Italy in the 1990s, providing an initial evaluation of its impacts. Using detailed data sources, we show that the expected boost in employment cannot be detected, the share of temporary contracts over open-ended ones has increased and the number of part-time contracts has risen. This evidence suggests that the Jobs Act is failing to achieve its main goals."

"This article explores the impact of innovation, offshoring and demand on profits and wage dynamics. The growing relevance of functional distribution in terms of explaining personal distribution underscores the importance of our results for understanding recent increases in inequality. The empirical analysis performed herein involves a panel of 38 manufacturing and service sectors over four time periods (1995 to 2010) across five European countries (Germany, France, Italy, Spain and United Kingdom). Our identification strategy relies on instrumental variables and recently proposed heteroskedasticity-based instruments (Lewbel, 2012). Additionally, we perform sensitivity analysis to account for omitted variables bias, following the recent theoretical results of Oster (2015). The main results of our study can be summed up in three points. First, it highlights the contrasting effects of R&D and offshoring as wage determinants: the former exerts a positive effect while the latter exert a negative effect. Second, it shows that external demand is a key variable driving profits growth. Third. it provides evidence of noteworthy results stemming from the categorization of workers according to skill level, such as: high-skilled workers are favored by both innovation and offshoring, offshoring exerts downward pressure primarily on low-skilled wages (not on mediumskilled wages as predicted by SBTC) and profits are positively correlated with high-skill wages, negatively correlated with medium-skill wages and not correlated with low-skill wages."

"Within-firm wage dispersion represents a relevant dimension of the overall wage inequality. A large stream of literature has analysed the wage-technology link without explicitly taking into account within-firm wage dispersion. In this work we aim to empirically investigate how technology affects within-firm wage dispersion and how it changes according to employer size. By exploiting employer-employee data from a survey of European firms (Eurostat's Structure of Earnings Survey - 2010) matched with information on sector innovation derived from the Community Innovation Survey, we look at the impact of innovation across small and medium-large firms, both on the average wages paid by firms and on the degree of within-firm wage inequality. Furthermore, we distinguish between high-paying and low-paying firms and more equal and unequal firms by means of a quantile regression approach."

"In the aftermath of the crisis, Europe is becoming more polarised in terms of employment, competitiveness and industrial specialisation. A “German-centred core”–which maintained employment and production–has emerged, contrasted by a “Southern periphery”, where major economic losses have occurred. Such geographical divergence is associated with a further polarisation in terms of skills. A new European industrial policy is needed to reverse this polarisation process and its dangerous implications for trade balances and cohesion."

" Job polarization instead of pure upgrading is emerging in European industries. This article focuses on polarization of the employment structure and contributes empirical evidence to explain patterns of occupational change in relation to four major groups: managers, clerks, craft workers and manual workers. Building on the structural approach, the author aims to analyse employment dynamics at the sectoral level and shed light on job polarization trends in Europe. Job polarization clearly emerges, mainly in service sectors, and in some European countries it is leading to a rejection of the hypothesis of skill upgrading sustained by the skill‐biased technical change paradigm."

"The aim of this paper is to shed light on the paths, directions, and ensuing degrees of technological adoption fostered by trade unions or, alternatively, forms of resistance thereof, in the so called 'Italian Motor-Valley', a distinctive technological district located in the outskirts of Bologna, Italy, specialised in the engineering/automotive industry. We find that the introduction of Industry 4.0 technology opens up a new space of action for trade unions in influencing firms' decisions on technological adoption. However, this new scope can have ambiguous effects, depending on how the process is governed. On the one hand, trade unions' involvement in said decisions might end up fostering corporatist tendencies, favouring the alignment of workers' and managers' objectives. On the other hand, such a major involvement can help both recompose old forms of dualism and revitalising workers' role in the crucial issue of work organisation."