Recent findings of the ISIGrowth project have been presented at the special session “The impact of labour market flexibility upon skills, innovation and wage dispersion” organised at the SASE Conference in Lyon
During the last two years, one of the major focuses of the EU-funded ISIGrowth project has been the broad realm of industrial relations, particularly in the domain of labour market flexibility and its impact upon firm, sectoral and macroeconomic dynamics. Recent findings of the ISIGrowth project have been presented at the special session “The impact of labour market flexibility upon skills, innovation and wage dispersion: insights from the ISIGrowth project” organised at the SASE Conference 2017 in Lyon, under the network “Industrial Relations and the Political Economy”.
The studies presented during the session focus on how alternative labour market governances and organizations (e.g. types of contracts) affect the macroeconomic dynamics, the process of capability accumulation, innovation strategies, inequality and wage dispersion. The session consisted of four papers, one theoretical and three empirical, both at firm and sectoral level of analysis.
The first paper “Causes and Consequences of Hysteresis: Aggregate Demand, Productivity and Employment” presented by Maria Enrica Virgillito discusses an Agent-Based Model (ABM) of the labour market to show the causes and consequences of hysteresis, via a process of worker skills accumulation which impacts upon firm level productivity.
On a similar vein, but from an empirical perspective, the paper “Innovation and temporary employment: diverging patterns across Europe?” presented by Valeria Cirillo digs inside into the relationship between alternative types of labour contracts and patterns of innovation and specialization of the industrial structure. The paper provides a cross-country European perspective, focusing on the diverging patterns of the continental vs the Mediterranean Europe.
Focusing on Italy, and following the hypothesis that different degrees of labour market flexibility may impact upon the innovative capacity of the firms, the paper “Exploring the relationship between labour flexibility and innovation: a test on a panel of Italian firms” by Dario Guarascio provides a panel-data analysis of 8000 Italian firms in the period 2007-2014.
Carrying on a cross-country European analysis, the study “Do firm-level pay agreements affect within-firm wage inequalities? Evidence across Europe” presented by Federico Tamagni provides a firm-level perspective on the empirical relationships between the degree of centralization/decentralization of the wage bargaining process in affecting within wage dispersion between high and low paid occupations.
Download here the full program