Employment Protection Legislation, Capital Investment and Access to Credit: Evidence from Italy

Federico Cingano, Marco Leonardi, Julian Messina and Giovanni Pica

No 354, Development Working Papers from Centro Studi Luca d'Agliano, University of Milano

Abstract: Employment protection may affect both productivity and capital investment because higher adjustments costs hamper allocative efficiency and may therefore affect both the optimal capital labor input mix and total factor productivity. To estimate the impact of dismissal costs on capital deepening and productivity we exploit a reform that introduced unjust-dismissal costs in Italy for firms below 15 employees, leaving firing costs unchanged for bigger firms. We provide evidence that the increase in firing costs induced capital deepening and a decline in total factor productivity in small firms relative to larger firms after the reform. We also find that capital deepening is more pronounced at the low-end of the capital distribution - where the reform arguably hit harder - and among firms endowed with a larger amount of liquid resources, that have more room to react thanks to an easier access to the credit market. Our results also indicate that the EPL reform reduced the probability to access the credit market, possibly because stricter EPL reduces both the value of the firm and the amount of internal resources that the firm can pledge as collateral against lenders.

Keywords: Capital Deepening; Severance Payments; Regression Discontinuity Design; Financial (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D24 G31 J65 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2013-07-18
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.dagliano.unimi.it//media/WP2013_354.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Employment Protection Legislation, Capital Investment and Access to Credit: Evidence from Italy (2016)
Working Paper: Employment protection legislation, capital investment and access to credit: evidence from Italy (2014)
Working Paper: Employment Protection Legislation, Capital Investment and Access to Credit: Evidence from Italy (2013)
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:csl:devewp:354

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Development Working Papers from Centro Studi Luca d'Agliano, University of Milano Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chiara Elli ().