for help with the data. The realization of the present article was possible thanks to the sponsorship and financial support to the "VisitINPS Scholars" program. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and are not the responsibility of INPS, the Bank of Italy, or the Eurosystem. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.
This paper studies career spillovers across workers, which arise in firms with limited promotion opportunities. We exploit a 2011 Italian pension reform that unexpectedly tightened eligibility criteria for the public pension, leading to sudden, substantial, and heterogeneous retirement delays. Using administrative data on Italian private-sector workers, the analysis leverages cross-firm variation to isolate the effect of retirement delays among soon-to-retire workers on the wage growth and promotions of their colleagues. We find evidence of spillover patterns consistent with older workers blocking the careers of their younger colleagues, but only in firms with limited promotion opportunities.
for help with the data. The realization of the present article was possible thanks to the sponsorship and financial support to the "VisitINPS Scholars" program. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and are not the responsibility of INPS, the Bank of Italy, or the Eurosystem. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.
We examine the role of managerial talent and its interaction with managerial practices in determining firm performance. We build a matched firm-director panel dataset for the universe of limited liability companies in Italy, tracking individuals across different firms over time. We define managerial talent as their capacity to boost firms' total factor productivity, estimated in a two-way fixed effects model. Combining the data with survey information on a representative sample of firms, we then document that our measure of talent correlates with ex-ante and ex-post indicators of ability, i.e., managers' educational attainment and forecasting precision of the firm's future performance. Most important, we leverage information on the adoption of managerial practices within the firm to examine potential synergies between managerial talent and structured managerial practices, thus building a bridge between two separate strands in the current literature. While talent and structured practices do boost firm productivity on their own, there is evidence of complementarities between the two. These findings hold both in a cross-sectional setting and in a panel analysis that accounts for time-invariant firm heterogeneity. Overall, our results indicate that the effectiveness of managerial practices depends on the managers' ability to use them.
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