IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/sef/csefwp/227.html

The Effect of Employment Protection Legislation and Financial Market Imperfections on Investment: Evidence from a Firm-Level Panel of EU countries

Author

Listed:
  • Federico Cingano

    (Bank of Italy)

  • Marco Leonardi

    (University of Milan and IZA)

  • Julian Messina

    (University of Girona, FEDEA and IZA)

  • Giovanni Pica

    (Università di Salerno and CSEF)

Abstract

This paper analyzes the joint effect of EPL and financial market imperfections on investment, capital-labour substitution, labour productivity and job reallocation in a cross-country framework. In the spirit of Rajan and Zingales (1998) and Ciccone and Papaioannou (2006), we exploit variation in the need for reallocation at the sectoral and aggregate level to assess the average effect of EPL on firms’ policies. Then, exploiting firm-level information we study if the effect of EPL is stronger in firms with lower levels of internal resources. We find that, on average, EPL reduces investment per worker, capital per worker and value added per worker in high reallocation sectors relative to low reallocation sectors. The reduction in the capital-labour ratio is less pronounced in firms with higher internal resources, suggesting that financial constraints exacerbate the negative effects of EPL on capital deepening.

Suggested Citation

  • Federico Cingano & Marco Leonardi & Julian Messina & Giovanni Pica, 2009. "The Effect of Employment Protection Legislation and Financial Market Imperfections on Investment: Evidence from a Firm-Level Panel of EU countries," CSEF Working Papers 227, Centre for Studies in Economics and Finance (CSEF), University of Naples, Italy.
    • Handle: RePEc:sef:csefwp:227
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.csef.it/WP/wp227.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • J21 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Labor Force and Employment, Size, and Structure

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sef:csefwp:227. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Dr. Maria Carannante (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cssalit.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.