ABSTRACT. This paper analyses the effects of board composition on the behaviour and performance of a sample of 114 Italian local public utilities, for which information about 1630 directors during 1994-2004 has been collected. This period is particularly interesting because of the legal changes that forced many firms to alter their juridical form and allowed the entrance of private investors. We investigate whether board size and/or board composition do affect decisions about employment and how they ultimately impact on performance. Our main findings indicate that politically connected directors, representing the state or the local municipality, dominate boards of directors in the Italian public utilities in the period under investigation. Politically connected directors exert a positive and significant effect on employment, while they impact negatively on performance.

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Within the recent debate on liberalization of local public services, the paper investigates the cost properties of a sample of Italian public utilities providing in combination gas, water and electricity. The estimates from a Composite Cost Function econometric model (Pulley and Braunstein, 1992) are compared with the ones coming from other traditional functional forms such as the Standard Translog, the Generalized Translog, and the Separable Quadratic. The results highlight the presence of global scope and scale economies only for multi-utilities with output levels lower than the ones characterizing the 'median' firm. This indicates that relatively small specialized firms would benefit from cost reductions by evolving into multi-utilities providing similar network services such as gas, water and electricity. However, for larger-scale utilities the hypothesis of null cost advantages is not rejected. Thus, it is possible that the recent diversification waves of leading companies are explained by factors other than cost synergies, so that the welfare gains that can be reasonably expected from such examples of horizontal integration, if any, are likely to be very low.

In this paper, we explore the impact of part-time work on firm productivity. Using a large panel data set of Italian corporations' balance sheets for the period 2000-2010, we first estimate firms' yearly productivity measures by removing the output contribution of the labor and capital inputs aggregates. We use different approaches aimed at solving input simultaneity, including a version of Ackerberg et al.'s (2006) control function approach, which accounts for firm fixed effects. We then match the productivity estimates with rich information on the firms' use of part-time work obtained from survey data for the years 2005, 2007, and 2010 and estimate the impact of part-time work on productivity. We find that a 10% increase in the share of part-timers reduces productivity by 1.45%. The results suggest that this harmful effect stems from horizontal rather than vertical part-time arrangements. We also find that firms declaring that they use part-time work to accommodate workers' requests suffer the most. Moreover, we show that the so-called 'flexible' and 'elastic' clauses are successful in cushioning the negative impact associated with part-time work.