New Workplace Practices and Firm Performance: A Comparative Study of Italy and Britain

Annalisa Cristini () and Dario Pozzoli ()
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Annalisa Cristini: Department of Economics, Postal: University of Bergamo, Via dei Caniana 2, 24127 Bergamo, Italy

No 08-9, Working Papers from University of Aarhus, Aarhus School of Business, Department of Economics

Abstract: Using data from the 2004 Workplace Employee Relations Survey on British establishments and two surveys on manufacturing firms located in the North of Italy, we look at the diffusion of new workplace practices in the two countries and at their impact on the firm's value added. We find that the adoption of innovation practices has spread substantially more across the British manufacturing firms than across the Italian ones; however our results also indicate that the practices' association with the firms' VA is much lower in Britain than in Italy. The counterfactual analysis shows that had the Italian workplaces the same characteristics of the British ones, in terms of diffusion of practices, capital intensity and skills, their average predicted value added would triplicate. On the other hand, were the Italian establishments to move and operate in the British context, their performance would improve very modestly. For the British establishments, we also investigate whether management practices improve job satisfaction.

Keywords: Workplace practices; Financial Performance; Italy; UK (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C33 J41 J53 L20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-eec, nep-eff, nep-knm and nep-lab
Date: 2008-05-01
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