1,721,083 research outputs found
Is firm’s productivity related to its financial structure? Evidence from microeconomic data
No full textSkill dispersion and firm productivity: An analysis with employer-employee matched data
No full textWe study the relation between workers' skill dispersion and firm productivity using a unique data set of Italian manufacturing firms with individual records on all their workers. Our measure of skill is the individual worker's effect from a wage equation. We find that a firm's productivity is positively related to skill dispersion within occupational status groups (production and nonproduction workers) and negatively related to skill dispersion between these groups. Con-© 2008 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved
Insurance within the firm
No full textThe full insurance hypothesis states that shocks to the firm's performance do not affect workers' compensation. In principal-agent models with moral hazard, firms trade off insurance and incentives to induce workers to supply the optimal level of effort. We use a long panel of matched employer-employee data to test the theoretical predictions of principal-agent models of wage determination in a general context where all types of workers, not only CEOs, are present. We allow for both transitory and permanent shocks to firm performance and find that firms are willing to absorb fully transitory fluctuations in productivity but insure workers only partially against permanent shocks. Risk-sharing considerations can account for about 10% of overall earnings variability, the remainder originating in idiosyncratic shocks. Finally, we show that the amount of insurance varies by type of worker and firm in ways that are consistent with principal-agent models but are hard to reconcile with competitive labour market models, with or without frictions
What Determines Entrepreneurial Clusters?
No full textWe contrast two potential explanations of the substantial differences in entrepreneurial activity observed across geographical areas: entry costs and external effects. We extend the Lucas model of entrepreneurship to allow for heterogeneous entry costs and for externalities that shift the distribution of entrepreneurial talents. We show that these assumptions have opposite predictions on the relation between entrepreneurial activity and firm-level TFP: with different entry costs, in areas with more entrepreneurs firms' average productivity should be lower; with heterogeneous external effects it should be higher. We test these implications on a sample of Italian firms and unambiguously reject the entry costs explanation in favor of the externalities explanation. We also investigate the sources of external effects, finding robust evidence that learning externalities are an important determinant of cross-sectional differences in entrepreneurial activity
Managerial Practices and Students' Performance
Full text linkWe study the effects of managerial practices in schools on students' outcomes. We measure managerial practices using the World Management Survey, a methodology that enables us to construct robust measures of management quality comparable across countries. We find substantial heterogeneity in managerial practices across six industrialized countries, with more centralized systems (Italy and Germany) lagging behind the more autonomous ones (Canada, Sweden, the UK, the US). For Italy, we are able to match organizational practices at the school level with students' outcomes in a math standardized test. We find that managerial practices are positively related to students' outcomes. The estimates imply that if Italy had the same managerial practices as the UK (the best performer), it would close the gap in the math OECD-PISA test with respect to the OECD average. We argue that our results are robust to selection issues and show that they are confirmed by a set of IV estimates and by a large number of robustness checks. Overall, our results suggest that policies directed at improving students' cognitive achievements should take into account principals' selection and training in terms of managerial capabilities
Spillovers in Industrial Districts
No full textWe study the role of social interaction (SI) in determining firms’ employment adjustments in industrial districts. We assume that SI matters only among firms that are both similar and geographically close. Our first test of this assumption is based on the correlation between individual and aggregate measures of employment adjustments. Exploiting the richness of our data, we directly address the problems of self-selection and unobserved common shocks that plague most of the empirical literature. Our second test shows that, as theory predicts, spillovers give rise to amplified responses to shocks and bunching of adjustments. This gives further support to the role of SI in industrial clusters and suggests that information spillovers, according to which firms’ actions convey useful information about a common problem, are one of the channels through which they take place
Managerial Practices and Student Performance
Full text linkWe study the effects of managerial practices in schools on student outcomes. We measure managerial practices using the World Management Survey, a methodology that enables us to construct robust measures of management quality comparable across countries.
We find substantial heterogeneity in managerial practices across six industrialized countries, with more centralized systems (Italy and Germany) lagging behind the more autonomous ones (Canada, Sweden, the UK, the US). For Italy, we are able to match
organizational practices at the school level with student outcomes in a math standardized test. We find that managerial practices are positively related to student outcomes.
The estimates imply that if Italy had the same managerial practices as the UK (the best performer), it would close the gap in the math OECD-PISA test with respect to
the OECD average. We argue that our results are robust to selection issues and show
that they are confirmed by a set of IV estimates and by a large number of robustness
checks. Overall, our results suggest that policies directed at improving student cognitive achievements should take into account principals selection and training in terms of managerial capabilities
Credit within the firm
No full textWe use variation in the degree of development of local credit markets and matched employer–
employee data to assess the role of the firm as an internal credit market. We find that firms operating in
less financially developed markets offer lower entry wages but faster wage growth than firms in more
financially developed markets. This helps firms finance their operations by implicitly raising funds from
workers. We control for local market fixed effects and only exploit time variation in the degree of local
financial development induced by an exogenous liberalization, so that the effect we find is unlikely to
reflect unobserved local factors that systematically affect wage–tenure profiles. We estimate that the
amount of credit generated by implicit lending within the firm is economically important and can be
as large as 30 percent of the bank lending. Consistent with credit market imperfections opening up trade
opportunities within the firm, we find that the internal rate of return of implicit loans lies between the rate at
which workers savings are remunerated in the market and the rate that firms pay on their loans from banks
Le competenze manageriali dei Dirigenti Scolastici italiani
No full textQuesto lavoro illustra i risultati di un’indagine sulle Capacità manageriali dei dirigenti scolastici (DS) italiani delle scuole secondarie superiori, confrontandoli con quelli di altri cinque paesi industrializzati (Canada, Gran Bretagna, Germania, Stati Uniti, Svezia). I dati sono stati raccolti attraverso dettagliate interviste sulle pratiche gestionali dei DS. I risultati indicano che le pratiche manageriali dei DS italiani sono sostanzialmente meno efficienti di quelle misurate negli altri paesi. La differenza non è attribuibile tanto ai maggiori vincoli istituzionali, che pur caratterizzano l’operato dei DS italiani, ma riflettono piuttosto una carenza intrinseca di competenze manageriali. Un ruolo importante sembra essere giocato dal processo di selezione dei DS, che non appare in grado imporre un livello minimo di capacità manageriali ai vincitori di concorso. Questi risultati implicano che qualunque riforma della scuola italiana non può prescindere dal miglioramento delle capacità manageriali dei DS, responsabili principali dell’implementazione delle politiche scolastiche
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