اثر بهره وری قراردادهای دائم و موقت کار در بخش تولید ایتالیایی

This paper studies the effect of permanent and temporary labor contracts on both labor-augmenting and TFP-augmenting technological factors using a panel dataset of Italian manufacturing firms. The empirical analysis applies a structural approach in which firm TFP follows a controlled Markov process that is affected by the relative use of labor contracts, and labor services are perfect substitutes but with different labor-augmenting factors. The empirical results show that when including labor-contract composition in the TFP process: i) the difference between permanent and temporary contracts in the labor-augmenting productivity factor is not significant and ii) the incidence of permanent contracts in total contracts has a positive effect on TFP dynamics.

This paper studies the effect of labor-contract choice on firm productivity. We consider permanent and temporary contracts and investigate their impact on both labor-augmenting and TFP-augmenting technological factors. Generally, it is assumed that these types of labor services are perfect substitutes and that permanent contracts imply higher productivity and higher expected costs than temporary contracts (see Caggese and Cuñat, 2008). We substantially agree with this view, but we question the source of the productivity gap. The literature has generally emphasized the difference in the labor-augmenting factor (see Aguirregabiria and Alonso-Borrego, 2009 and Caggese and Cuñat, 2008) but we do not feel fully comfortable with this interpretation, because it does not capture the intertemporal effect of labor-contract choice, while the time dimension is the element characterizing the type of contract. Our analysis suggests that labor-contract choice may affect the evolution of the firm productivity process and not (or not only) the level of labor productivity in a given productivity framework. We test our hypothesis using a panel dataset of Italian manufacturing firms. We assume that firm TFP follows a controlled Markov process that may be affected by the relative use of labor contracts and that labor services are perfect substitutes but may be characterized by different labor-augmenting factors. The empirical analysis is conducted by following the structural approach originally proposed by Olley and Pakes (1996) and by taking into account the multicollinearity issue highlighted by Ackerberg et al. (2006). The empirical results show that by endogenizing the TFP process: i) the difference between permanent and temporary contracts in the labor-augmenting productivity factor is not significant and ii) the incidence of permanent contracts in total contracts has a positive effect on TFP dynamics. These results are consistent with the idea that the use of temporary contracts may allow an efficient allocation of labor services but dampen a source of TFP growth, as some empirical analyses based on aggregate data seem to highlight (references discussed in the next section).

In this paper, we investigated the effect of the choice between permanent and temporary labor contracts on productivity. We got two main results. First, the view that temporary contracts reduce firm TFP growth is supported by the analysis of the sample of firm-level data we have used. This result is consistent with recent findings based on aggregate data which highlight a negative effect of low restrictions on the use of temporary contracts on productivity growth. Secondly, the estimate of the difference in the labor-augmenting factor between temporary and permanent contracts may be biased if the effect of labor-contract composition on TFP dynamics is not taken into account. Indeed, our results suggest that temporary contracts are characterized by a labor-augmenting factor lower than that of permanent contracts only when firm TFP is assumed exogenous. Otherwise, this difference is not significant when the effect of the labor-contract composition on TFP dynamics is taken into account.