Enrico Zaninotto

Crescita della produttività, progresso tecnico e impiego del lavoro nelle imprese manifatturiere italiane: 1996-2006

The article analyses the productivity dynamics of a sample of Italian manufacturing firms in the period 1996-2006. The first part computes Malmquist measures of productivity using non parametric techniques. Our measures show that the low rate of growth in productivity is due to the different models used to adapt to the changes in the competitive environment. Up to 2000, all the firms attempted to improve efficiency, whereas technical progress is absent. After 2000, there is evidence that a group of firms advance the technical frontier, while many firms lag behind and increase the frontier gap. The second part of the article correlates the observed measures of productivity to some characteristics of the employed labor. The hypothesis that productive performances could be put in relation to the two tiers of the labor markets resulting from the reforms adopted at the end of the century is supported. Highly productive firms use a higher share of skilled labor and fewer part-time workers. The reverse is true for less efficient firms. Jel classification:

Standards and standardization on the eve of a new century

· This paper surveys some problems of standard sett ing and adoption in a highly f lex ib le economic society which demands new and di f ferent iated products (postfordist organization). In part icular , i t shows how adopting a nonhierarchical standard could cause problems w h e n making laroe s c a l e co-ordination la ter on. Unpredictabil i ty and path dependency are c lear ly the common features of technolooical adoption patterns. When the technolooy adopted is supported by the majority, i t i s difficult to change, which makes it crucial for f i rms and other decision makers to make the right choices in the ear ly phase of technolooical development. ost-fordism and standards Managers always need new buzzwords. They fill the market with them. Postfordism is one of the new words that may help us understand our changing environment. It tries to capture what is new in industrial societies as a consequence of the diffusion of information and communication technologies. It defines the new (post-) contrasts it with the old (fordism): Flexibility versus rigidity; adaptive and evolutionary versus planned and fixed relations with the environment; variety and differentiation versus standardization and homogeneity. Two main forces are at work in creating a post-fordist organization. The first, driven by demand, is a new attitude toward variety and differentiation. A higher disposable income and new cultural attitudes that stress individual behavior increase the value consumers place on variety. The second comes from the corporate side in the form of new technologies, especially applications of information and communication technologies to production processes, which have dramatically lowered the cost of producing varieties of products. Multipurpose workstations, industrial robots, and numerically controlled machines reduced setup costs; automated materials-handling systems and local area networks reduced the cost of co-ordinating complex materials flows, and so on. While previously, operations needed simpler production flows and required working with nonchangeable systems, it is now possible to cope with more complex and variable flows. Is it possible to separate post-fordism from standardization? Stated differently, is a post-fordist society a place in which there is no room for homogeneity, fixed norms, variety, and variability reduction? The author feels that post-fordism needs standardization, but one different than in the past. Standardization in a post-fordist society can be seen by contrasting it with that in a fordist society:

Cooperation as Illusory Hill-climbing: Co-adaptation and Search in Social Dilemmas

In this paper, we argue that the amount of cooperation delivered by agents in a social dilemma may be explained by the shape of individual payoff surfaces and by how these surfaces are coupled in the structure of the game. Artificial agents performing simple adaptation on such surfaces generate patterns of cooperation that qualitatively match behavior in laboratory settings.

Technical efficiency and the vertical boundaries of the firm: theory and evidence

This article provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of the relationship between firms’ technical efficiency and the vertical organization of production. Technical inefficiency is explicitly introduced as the source of firms’ heterogeneity in a Bertrand–Nash model of industry competition: the main prediction of the model is that the most efficient firms choose vertical integrated structures and the less-efficient ones choose disintegrated structures. The empirical part of the article rests on a stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) in a sample of about 400 Italian machine tool (MT) builders, and the result supports the prediction of the theoretical model.

Does Work Flexibility Help Firm Flexibility? Case-study Evidence

Introduzione. - Lo schema di analisi. - Disegno e metodologia della ricerca. - Flessibilita e adattamento al mercato dei prodotti. - Non Standard Forms of Employment e incontro tra domanda e offerta di lavoro. - Conclusioni

New Evidences on the Productivity Slowdown in Italy and in Italian North East Regions

This paper analyzes the trend of industrial productivity in Italy in the decade preceding the 2008 crisis and compares manufacturing sectors in North East regions with other areas of the country, using a large database of manufacturing firms. The Malmquist productivity growth index is calculated by means of a robust non-parametric approach and decomposed into the two components of technical change and efficiency change. The results show that the index components follow different patterns in subperiods: before 2000 the productivity slow-down is due mainly to the technological change component, while in the years 2003-2006 we observe a technological advancement that is partly eroded by a growing inefficiency. These empirical evidences seem to reconcile two alternative views, the one highlighting the regress of Italian manufacturing and the other emphasizing the existence of a dynamic tier of medium size firms, that have emerged in the interpretation of the evolution of Italian industry in the last decade.

Management Practices, Environmental Conditions and Productive Efficiency in the Service Industry. An Empirical Study of the Hotel Industry in Trentino

The hotel industry shows a wide dispersion of productive efficiency. The paper tries to isolate the exogenous determinants of the observedproductivity levels from factors related to corporate management. Among the exogenous determinants, demand conditions and the varying degree of attractiveness of tourism destinations play a central role. To assess how these factors influence the productivity of hotels we apply the metafrontier approach, a recent development of the Data Envelopment Analysis. The method allows identifying two components of the performance of each hotel: the distance of each unit from the local technological frontier and a metatechnology ratio that captures how far the local frontier is from the global one. Using an original database built by the statistical office of the Autonomous Province of Trento, the authors gauge the contribution of both components to the overall performance of hotels operating in 14 tourism destinations of the region. Results show that a large share of variability in productivity levels is due to the within component of each area; i.e., productivity differences in the same area are wider than differences between areas. This result holds even after controlling for quality differences across hotels, thus suggesting that organization and management practices are a major source of the observed heterogeneity.