IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/trn/utwpeu/20110.html

Finance, Property Rights and Productivity in Italian Cooperatives

Author

Listed:
  • Donald A. R. George
  • Eddi Fontanari
  • Ermanno C. Tortia

Abstract

Standard economic theory predicts that the accumulation of capital by means of indivisible reserves would lead to underinvestment and undercapitalization due to the truncated temporal horizon of worker-members in cooperatives (the so-called "Furubotn-Pejovich effect"). An inefficiently low stock of capital would imply, other conditions being equal, lower labour productivity. We test the real effects of collective capital on productivity using a large panel of Italian worker and social cooperatives. Firm-level balance sheet data from Bureau van Dijk Aida database are used to estimate the effects of collective and individual reserves of capital on total factor productivity using an augmented Cobb-Douglas production function. Social security data on employment contracts in all Italian enterprises are used to measure firm-level full-time worker equivalents employment. Collective ownership and total factor productivity are positively and significantly related after controlling for factor productivity, individual capital ownership and other standard firm-level and sectoral controls. This result is robust to different specifications of the model and suggests a positive role of collective capital in strengthening financial sustainability, patrimonial and employment stability in the long run, favouring also firm specific investments.

Suggested Citation

  • Donald A. R. George & Eddi Fontanari & Ermanno C. Tortia, 2020. "Finance, Property Rights and Productivity in Italian Cooperatives," Euricse Working Papers 20110, Euricse (European Research Institute on Cooperative and Social Enterprises).
    • Handle: RePEc:trn:utwpeu:20110
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.euricse.eu/publications/wp-110-20-finance-property-rights-and-productivity-in-italian-cooperatives/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • J54 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Labor-Management Relations, Trade Unions, and Collective Bargaining - - - Producer Cooperatives; Labor Managed Firms
    • P13 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Capitalist Economies - - - Cooperative Enterprises
    • P14 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Capitalist Economies - - - Property Rights

    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:trn:utwpeu:20110. 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: Barbara Franchini (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/euricit.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.