Age, technology and labour Costs

Is the process of workforce aging a burden or a blessing for the firm? Our paper seeks to answer this question by providing evidence on the ageproductivity and age-earnings profiles for a sample of plants in three manufacturing industries (“forest”, “industrial machinery” and “electronics”) in Finland. Our main result is that exposure to rapid technological and managerial changes does make a difference for plant productivity, less so for wages. In electronics, the Finnish industry undergoing a major technological and managerial shock in the 1990s, the response of productivity to age-related variables is first sizably positive and then becomes sizably negative as one looks at plants with higher average seniority and experience. This declining part of the curve is not there either for the forest industry or for industrial machinery. It is not there either for wages in electronics. These conclusions survive when a host of other plausible productivity determinants (notably, education and plant vintage) are included in the analysis. We conclude that workforce aging may be a burden for firms in high-tech industries and less so in other industries.Aging, technology, TFP, wage determination, Finland, new economy, growth

Italy’s decline: getting the facts right

The Italian economy is often said to be on a declining path. In this paper, we document that: (i) Italy’s current decline is a labor productivity problem (ii) the labor productivity slowdown stems from declining productivity growth in all industries but utilities (with manufacturing contributing for about one half of the reduction) and diminished interindustry reallocation of workers from agriculture to market services; (iii) the labor productivity slowdown has been mostly driven by declining TFP, with roughly unchanged capital deepening. The only mild decline of capital deepening is due to the rise in the value added share of capital that counteracted declining capital accumulation.Productivity growth, Productivity slowdown, TFP, decline, Italy

Off-shoring and productivity growth in the Italian manufacturing industries

We employ input-output tables to study the relation between off-shoring and productivity growth in the Italian manufacturing industries in 1995-2003. Our results indicate that not all types of off-shoring are positively related to productivity growth. In particular, the international outsourcing of intermediates within the same industry (“narrow off-shoring”) is beneficial for productivity growth, while the off-shoring of services is not. We also find that the way in which off-shoring is measured may matter considerably. The positive relation between off-shoring of intermediates and productivity growth disappears when our direct measure of off-shoring is replaced with the Feenstra-Hanson measure employed in other studies.International trade, Productivity growth; offshoring; Italian economy

Country characteristics and the incidence of capital income taxation on wages: an empirical assessment

This paper examines the incidence of corporate income taxes on wages using data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics for 13 OECD countries. Within a wage-bargaining framework, our econometric analysis shows that a substantial share of the corporate tax burden is shifted from capital to labour. However, the magnitude of this shift is influenced importantly by country characteristics affecting the process of wage determination, such as the degree of capital mobility, a country's relative influence over the world price of output and trade unions’ strength

Rethinking the import-productivity nexus for Italian manufacturing

We provide evidence on the firm level productivity effects of imports of intermediates. By exploiting a large panel of Italian manufacturing firms, we are able to separately explore the role of importing from high and low income countries. Importing does not permanently affect the firm productivity growth. This finding holds both when we test for the import entry by means of Propensity Score Matching techniques and when we analyse the import intensity within a dynamic panel data model framework. On the contrary, we confirm the existence of self-selection into importing. Also, our evidence supports the learning-by-exporting effects in Italian manufacturing and we prove that this result is robust to the control of firm import activity