Paola Rota

How Much Does Hiring and Firing Cost? Survey Evidence from a Sample of Italian Firms

We analyse the Italian labour market, which is typically considered to be highly regulated. We focus on the costs imposed on firms by the institutional environment in which they operate, and on the adjustment strategies that they pursue as a result. We have followed two complementary approaches: the analysis of the development of the laws relating to hiring and firing, together with a set of interviews of 61 manufacturing firms. This also allows us to quantify the extent of turnover costs on the total labour costs. Hiring costs, which include recruiting and training, range between 2.0 and 2.6 months of labour costs; firing costs range from less than half a monthly labour cost to 20 months of labour costs in cases of conflict. Copyright Fondazione Giacomo Brodolini and Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998.

Investment and Time to Plan: A Comparison of Structures vs. Equipment in a Panel of Italian Firms

Time to build models of investment expenditures play an important role in many traditional and modern theories of the business cycle, especially for explaining the dynamic propagation of shocks. We estimate the structural parameters of a time-to-build model using firm-level investment data on equipment and structures. For equipment expenditures, we find no evidence of time-to-build effects beyond one period. For structures, by contrast, there is clear evidence of time to build in the range of 2-3 years. The contrast between equipment and structures is intuitively reasonable and consistent with previous results. The estimates for structures also indicate that initial-period expenditures are low, and increase as projects near completion. These results provide empirical support for including time to plan effects for investment in structures. More generally, these results suggest a potential source of specification error for Q models of investment and production-based asset pricing models that ignore the time required to plan, build and install new capital.

Non-convexities in the Adjustment of Different Capital Inputs: A Firm-level Investigation

Recent developments in investment research have highlighted the importance of non-convexities and irreversibilities in the firms’ adjustment of quasi-fixed inputs. However, aggregation across capital goods may smooth out the discontinuities associated with the adjustment of individual assets. The lack of suitable data, is one of the reasons why empirical work has stronlgy relied on the assumption of capital homogeneity. In this paper we exploit a new data set of 1539 Italian firms which allows us to disaggregate across several capital types and consider separately purchases and sales of assets. We start from the basic disaggregation between equipment and structures and construct measures of fundamental Q to capture investment opportunities associated with each asset. To uncover the pattern of dynamic adjustment we use non-parametric techniques to relate each individual investment to own fundamental Q.

Unidimensionality, asymmetry and (S,s) rules in labour demand

We analyse the conditions under which an (S,s) rule may be implemented in the case of labour demand. The (S,s) rule implies a specific ordering of choices: downward adjustment, nonadjustment and upward adjustment with the decision of inaction lying crucially in the middle. This requires an exact negative relation between the choice-specific error terms. The particular ordering of choices implied may be estimated by an ordered probit. We test the (S,s) rule nesting the ordered probit within a multinomial model with correlated error terms. The restriction to a univariate error distribution is rejected by the data.