Labor Market Institutions, Productivity, and the Business Cycle: An Application to Italy

This paper studies the effect of labor market institutions on the cyclicality of labor productivity and aggregate fluctuations in Italy. It uses a New Keynesian model with labor market frictions and labor effort when two wage bargaining settings (efficient Nash and right-to-manage) interact with three types of hiring costs. We focus on three sets of labor market deregulation modeled as a fall in wage rigidity, hiring costs, and the bargaining power of workers. We show that, when labor effort varies, reforms trigger procyclical productivity under efficient bargaining, and countercyclical productivity under right-to-manage bargaining. Reforms also have different effects on cyclical moments. Second, we estimate the model with Bayesian techniques and find that productivity is mainly driven by technology shocks.