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.

Using rich longitudinal matched employer-employee data for Belgium, we provide a first investigation of the impact of sickness absenteeism on firms' productivity. To do so, we estimate a production function augmented with a firm-level measure of sickness absenteeism that we constructed from worker-level information on nonworked hours due to illness or injury. We deal with the endogeneity of inputs and sickness absenteeism by applying a modified version of the semiparametric control function method developed by Ackerberg, Caves, and Fraser (2015), which explicitly takes firm fixed unobserved heterogeneity into account. Our main finding is that, in general, sickness absenteeism substantially dampens firms' productivity. However, further analyses show that the impact varies according to several workforce and firm characteristics. Sickness absenteeism is more detrimental to firm productivity when absent workers are high tenure or blue collar. Moreover, it is especially harmful to industrial, capital-intensive, and small enterprises. These findings are consistent with the idea that sickness absenteeism is more problematic when absent workers have in-depth firm-/task-specific knowledge, when the employees' work is highly interconnected (e.g., along the assembly line), and when firms face more organizational limitations in substituting absent workers.

In this paper, we explore the impact of a firm's workers' replacements on innovation performance, by using rich matched employer-employee panel data for the Veneto region of Italy. We take the well-known resource-based theory of the firm as our departure point, and develop a set of hypotheses which we test empirically with negative binomial regressions. Coherently with our theoretical framework, we find that workers' replacements significantly dampen innovation performance, because they generate losses in the tacit knowledge base of the firm. We also find that workers' replacements are especially detrimental to large and young firms, because large companies have more hierarchical rigidities and innovative capabilities in young firms are mostly dependent on specific human capital. Finally, our results show that firms' localization in industrial districts significantly mitigates the negative impact of workers' replacements, and that a similar picture emerges when firms are more exposed to knowledge spillovers, particularly of related knowledge.

Measuring the economic impact of coworkers from different countries of origin sparked intense scrutiny in labor economics, albeit with an uncomfortable methodological limitation. Most attempts have involved metrics that eliminate most of the socially and economically relevant heterogeneity among different countries of origin, salient dimension of diversity and critical determinant of labor market outcomes of migrants. The typical examples of such metrics are diversity indicators that divide the firm's workforce into binary categories such as blacks and whites, foreigners and natives, and non-Europeans and Europeans. We propose an entirely novel approach that constructs a firm-level aggregate measure of diversity that explicitly takes into account differences in socio-economic conditions of migrants' countries of origin. To do so, we use the United Nations Development Programme's Human Development Index (HDI), a standard harmonized measure of cross-country variations in levels of socio-economic development that is available for virtually all the countries in the world. By resorting to rich matched employer-employee panel data for Belgium, we use this new aggregate measure of firmlevel diversity to estimate firm-level wage equations, which control for a wide range of observable and time-invariant unobservable factors, including variations in labor productivity between firms and within firms over time. The results seem to suggest that the majority of firms do not discriminate against foreigners. However, our findings show that firms with high diversity might broadly discriminate against them. The wage discrimination in high-diversity firms could be alleviated through a stronger presence of collective bargaining and efforts to de-cluster foreigners from low-HDI countries in these firms.There is a vast literature on the potential causal links between diversity in terms of countries of origin and wages. In this section, we summarize the theoretical arguments for such links by grouping them into three types of effects. We then discuss two moderating factors: firm-level collective bargaining and different levels of diversity in the firm. Arguments for a causal link between diversity and wagesMost of the theoretical explanations concerning the impact of diversity on wages can be grouped into three types of effects: productivity, sorting/segregation, and bargaining effects.Evidence for wage discrimination in firms with high diversity

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