Abstract
We investigate the effects of female executives on gender-specific wage distributions and firm performance. Female leadership has a positive impact at the top of the female wage distribution ...and a negative impact at the bottom. The impact of female leadership on firm performance increases with the share of female workers. We account for the endogeneity induced by non-random executives’ gender by including firm fixed-effects, by generating controls from a two-way fixed-effects regression and by using instruments based on regional trends. The findings are consistent with a model of statistical discrimination in which female executives are better at interpreting signals of productivity from female workers. This suggests substantial costs of women under-representation among executives.
Abstract
Using data on bank-firm relationships in Italy during the Eurozone financial crisis, we show that: (i) compared to healthy banks, under-capitalised banks cut credit to healthy but not to ...zombie firms and are more likely to prolong a credit relationship with a zombie; (ii) in area sectors with more low-capital banks, zombies are more likely to survive; (iii) bank under-capitalisation does not hurt the growth rate of healthy firms. We provide evidence that extending credit to the weakest firms during the recession mitigated the disruption of supply chains and adverse local demand externalities.
We study the effects of asymmetric information and imperfect competition in the market for small business lines of credit. We estimate a structural model of credit demand, loan use, pricing, and firm ...default using matched firm-bank data from Italy. We find evidence of adverse selection in the form of a positive correlation between the unobserved determinants of demand for credit and default. Our counterfactual experiments show that while increases in adverse selection increase prices and defaults on average, reducing credit supply, banks’ market power can mitigate these negative effects.
In this paper, we present cross-country evidence on firm size distribution, firm demographic and post-entry performance for 10 OECD countries. We use harmonized firm-level data drawn from business ...registers or social security records.These data enable international comparisons and the identification of idiosyncratic country effects. While average firm size differs across countries, due to both sectoral specialization and within-sector characteristics, we find similar degrees of firm churning across countries. In most of them, about 20% of firms enter and exit most markets every year; and about 20–40% of entering firms fail within the first 2 years of life. However, post-entry growth of successful entrants is much higher in the USA than in Europe, which may be indicative of barriers to firm growth as opposed to barriers to entry.
Using firm-level based TFP indicators (as opposed to employment-based proxies) we estimate the effects of alternative sources of dynamic externalities at the local level. In contrast to previous ...empirical work, we find that industrial specialization and scale indicators affect TFP growth positively, while neither product variety nor the degree of local competition have any effect. Employment-based regressions yield nearly the opposite results, in line with most of previous empirical work. We argue that such regressions suffer from serious identification problems when interpreted as evidence of dynamic externalities. Our results question the conclusions of most of the existing literature on dynamic agglomeration economies.
Exports and wages Macis, Mario; Schivardi, Fabiano
Journal of labor economics,
10/2016, Letnik:
34, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
We use linked employer-employee data from Italy to explore the relationship between exports and wages. Exploiting the 1992 devaluation of the lira, we show that exporting firms both pay a wage ...premium above what their workers would earn in the outside labor market (the “rent-sharing” effect) and employ workers whose skills command a higher price after the devaluation (the “skill composition” effect). The latter only emerges once we allow for the value of workers’ skills to differ in the pre- and post-devaluation periods. We also document that the export wage premium is larger for workers with more export-related experience.
Abstract
Using exhaustive administrative data on Italian social security records, we construct measures of local labour market thickness for executives that vary by industry and location. We show ...that firm performance is strongly and persistently affected by executive death, but only in thin local labour markets. The new executives hired after death events in thin local labour markets have lower education levels and are more likely to be replaced. These predictions are consistent with a simple model of executive search in which market thickness determines the arrival rate of applications for executive positions.
Abstract
Since the middle of the 1990s, productivity growth in Southern Europe has been substantially lower than in other developed countries. We argue that this divergence was partly caused by ...inefficient management practices, which limited Southern Europe’s gains from the IT Revolution. To quantify this effect, we build a multi-country general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms and workers. In our model, the IT Revolution generates divergence for three reasons. First, inefficient management limits Southern firms’ productivity gains from IT adoption. Second, IT increases the aggregate importance of management, making its inefficiencies more salient. Third, IT-driven wage increases in other countries stimulate Southern high-skill emigration. We calibrate our model using firm-level evidence, and show that it can account for 35% of Italy’s, 47% of Spain’s, and 81% of Portugal’s productivity divergence with respect to Germany between 1995 and 2008. Counterfactual policy experiments show that subsidies to IT adoption or education cannot reduce this gap: only policies that directly tackle inefficient management are effective.
We disentangle the contribution of unobserved heterogeneity in demand and productivity to firm growth using Italian data containing unique information on firm-level prices. Demand and total factor ...productivity (TFP) shocks are equally important in shaping firm growth. However, the pass-through of shocks to growth is highly incomplete, more so for productivity shocks. We argue that incompleteness and asymmetry of the pass-through can be explained by frictions that, unlike those studied by the literature on factor misallocation, have differential effects according to the nature of the shock. We propose hurdles to firms' ability to reorganize as an example of these types of frictions.
Employment and Wage Insurance within Firms Ellul, Andrew; Pagano, Marco; Schivardi, Fabiano
Review of financial studies/The Review of financial studies,
04/2018, Letnik:
31, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Using a firm-level international panel data set, we study if unemployment insurance offered by the government and by firms are substitutes. We exploit cross-country and time-series variation in ...public unemployment insurance as a shifter of workers’ demand for insurance within firms, and family versus nonfamily ownership as a shifter of firms’ supply of insurance. Our evidence supports the substitutability hypothesis: employment stability in family firms is greater, and the wage discount larger, in countries and periods with less generous public unemployment insurance, whereas no such substitutability emerges for nonfamily firms.
PDF
