Firms' Margins of Adjustment to Wage Growth. The Case of Italian Collective Bargaining

Francesco Devicienti () and Bernardo Fanfani

No def102, DISCE - Working Papers del Dipartimento di Economia e Finanza from Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Dipartimenti e Istituti di Scienze Economiche (DISCE)

Abstract: This paper studies firms' adjustment behavior to the growth in labor costs induced by Italian collective bargaining institutions. Our research design compares several firms' outcomes across collective agreements within the same sector and geographic location, exploiting discontinuities in contractual wages' growth as a source of vari- ation in labor costs. Results show that on average employment, revenues, profits and investments fall, wages increase, while firms' productivity and workers' average quality do not change in response to higher labor costs. These e ects are highly heterogeneous across the firms' productivity distribution. Employment, revenues, productivity, profits and investments are positively or not related to contractual wage growth among relatively more ecient firms, while they are negatively related to this shock at less productive companies. More efficient firms tend to substitute high- with low-skilled workers, which are instead more likely to be laid o by less ecient employers. These results suggest that more efficient companies adjust to the generalized growth in labor costs through cost-saving strategies and they may benefit from cleansing effects that tend to increase their product market shares.

Keywords: Collective Bargaining; Minimum Wage; Productivity; Employment; Matched Employer-Employee Data. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J00 J23 J24 J31 J38 J58 L13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45
Date: 2021-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dipartimenti.unicatt.it/economia-finanza-def102.pdf First version, 2021 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Firms' margins of adjustment to wage growth: the case of Italian collective bargaining (2025)
Working Paper: Firms' Margins of Adjustment to Wage Growth: The Case of Italian Collective Bargaining (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ctc:serie1:def102

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in DISCE - Working Papers del Dipartimento di Economia e Finanza from Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Dipartimenti e Istituti di Scienze Economiche (DISCE) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Simone Moriconi ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).