Family Firms and Labor Productivity: The Role of Enterprise-Level Bargaining in the Italian Economy

摘要

We investigate the role of Italian firms in labor productivity performance. We find that family-owned firms have lower labor productivity than their non-family counterparts. In a second step, we estimate the role of firm-level bargaining (FLB) to determine whether family-controlled firms that adopt this type of bargaining may partially close the gap in terms of labor productivity with their non-family competitors. Our results, obtained through IV estimation to control for endogeneity bias, suggest that enterprises under family governance achieve significant labor productivity gains-greater than those achieved by their non-family counterparts-when they adopt firm-level bargaining.