Labor-Managed Cooperatives and Private Firms in North Central Italy: An Empirical Comparison

Financial development and the growth of cooperative firms

“…Moreover, these studies also tend to stress that institutions can reduce agency costs between ownership and management, thus rendering less acute the incentive problem of free-riding by team members, and encouraging mutual monitoring (Staber 1989;Bartlett et al 1992;Bonin et al 1993;Bayo-Moriones et al 2002). As a result, this may allow cooperatives to achieve even better productivity and performance than conventional firms.…”

Is competition really bad news for cooperatives? Some empirical evidence for Italian producers’ cooperatives

“…Jones and Svejnar (1985) find that the superior performance of Italian producers' cooperatives could be ascribed to structural characteristics of co-ops like profit-sharing and participation. Also, Bartlett et al (1992) find that Italian co-ops achieve higher levels of both labour and capital productivity than comparable private firms. However, mean values may hide a lot of heterogeneity in the distribution of the efficiency scores across the observations.…”

“…3.3 The institutional framework, The data-set and the variables The Italian cooperative system is one of the largest in the Western economies and not surprisingly it has been the object of several empirical studies in the field (Pencavel et al 2005;Bartlett et al 1992; Jones and Svejnar 1985 among the others). The cooperative sector contributes to the 7-8% of GDP (Lega delle Cooperative 2006).…”

“…First, we test empirically the extent to which there is a positive relationship between increasing competition in the product market and technical efficiency for a panel of conventional and cooperative Italian firms, specialised in the production of wine, over the time 1996-2001. Italy is the country with one of largest cooperative sectors among Western economies; therefore several studies on Italian co-ops have been conducted, so providing a useful benchmark against which our results can be compared (Pencavel et al 2005;Bartlett et al 1992;Jones and Svejnar 1985). Also we decided to focus on the wine sector because firms in this sector (as in the agro-food sector in general) have been subject to fierce competitive pressure from foreign firms during the period under examination.…”

Property rights and farm efficiency: evidence from Ukraine

“…3 Several empirical studies in the US, Sweden, Italy, and England demonstrate that employee-owned firms are more efficient producers than their conventional counterparts (Craig et al 1995;Kruse and Blasi 1997;Blasi et al 2003;Sesil 2006;and Kramer 2008). 4 The employee-owned firms have higher labor productivity and use more labor-intensive production than the private firms (Bartlett et al 1992;Kruse et al 2008). In contrast, Winther and Marens (1997) and Freeman et al (2000) do not find any consistent effects of employee ownership and ''employee involvement'' practices on productivity in the US.…”