Empirical Economics最新文献

We use survey data on Italian small- and medium-sized enterprises collected during the COVID-19 pandemic to explore the relationship between the adoption of work from home (WFH) practices and organizational performance. In so doing, we investigate several dimensions of organizational performance, including measures of labor productivity and workers’ concentration and motivation, the level of absenteeism, the organization of work through management by objectives (MBO), and the presence of coordination and communication costs. We obtain several results. First, we find a significantly enhanced capability of firms that adopted WFH during the pandemic to sustain the overall organizational performance, particularly when such a work practice is used intensively. Less deteriorated labor productivity and workers’ concentration and motivation, decreased absenteeism, and a substantial rise in the adoption of MBO practices seem to be important aspects behind the detected benefits related to WFH. Third, when WFH is used at medium levels of intensity, it is associated with augmented coordination and communication costs, which nonetheless do not appear to overcome the benefits associated with WFH.

This study investigates the effects of procurement tools to support small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in public contracts by analysing contract awards for public works published on Tenders Electronic Daily in 2018–2022. Focusing on dividing contracts into smaller lots, a key feature of the 2014 EU modernised procurement framework, this study’s findings reveal that splitting contracts might not necessarily attract SMEs to bid but increases their chances of winning such contracts. Other factors, such as using open and unrestricted bidding procedures and allowing SMEs to showcase their specialisation by awarding contracts based on the best price-quality ratio, positively affect the SMEs’ bidding. The findings of this study emphasise the importance of thoroughly considering individual contract characteristics and overall procurement settings to accommodate SMEs’ limited resource capacities and foster their performance in the public procurement marketplace.

This article revisits the relationship between economic growth and exchange rate misalignments. We aim to test whether undervaluation's impact on growth depends on institutional quality, as suggested in the previous literature. In our analysis, we focus on recent decades characterized by globalization. We use the framework of cross-country growth regressions estimated using the recently developed two-stage instrumental variable method, which allows accounting for cross sectional dependence. In addition, we use external instruments to address the potential endogeneity between economic growth and undervaluation. Our results confirm the positive relationship between undervaluation and growth across all income groups from low-income to high-income countries. The role of institutions in the transmission of undervaluation on growth appears consistently only among lower-middle-income countries. Therefore, while our results point to the positive effects of undervaluation, the support for the hope that countries can successfully compensate for poor institutional quality via the undervaluation of currencies is weaker and limited to specific stages of economic development.

The objective of the paper is to understand the role of workers’ bargaining for the labor share in transition economies. We rely on a share-capital schedule, whereby workers’ bargaining power is represented as a move off the schedule. Quantitative indicators of bargaining power are supplemented with self-constructed qualitative indices derived from textual information describing the legal environment enabling bargaining in each country. Due to multiple data constraints, we employ a cross-sectional empirical model estimated using instrumental variables (IV) methods, where former unionization rates and the time since the adoption of the ILO Collective Bargaining Convention serve as instruments. The sample comprises 23 industrial branches across 69 countries, including 28 transition economies. In general, we find the stronger bargaining power to influence higher labor share, when the former is measured either quantitatively or qualitatively. Conversely, higher bargaining power is associated with a lower labor share in transition economies. This is likely a matter of delayed response to wage pushes, a function of the structural transformation of transition economies, and reconciled with the increasing role of MNCs which did not confront the workers’ power rise per se, but introduced automation and changed market structure amid labor market flexibilization, which eventually deferred bargaining power’s positive effect on labor share.