No abstract

The African industrial structure is characterized by firm-size heterogeneity with the coexistence of small, if not micro, enterprises in the informal sector and large formal organizations operating with modern technology. In this paper, using the Data Envelopment Analysis production frontier methodology, we investigate the technical efficiency of Ivorian manufacturing firms in four sectors of economic activity: textiles and garments, metal products, food processing, and wood and furniture. Efficiency scores are adjusted to take into account the impact of the external operating environment. These scores are then broken down into three elements: the purely managerial effect, the impact of the scale of production, and a technological effect capturing the potential gain that could result from the adoption of modern technology by small informal organizations. Not only formal activities prove to be more efficient in scaling their production but also, they greatly benefit from their modern technology.

Many non-profit enterprises are created ex-nihilo by individuals. The choice of non-profit status may be all the more surprising since this legal form denies founders the right to appropriate profits from the invested capital. The aim of this article is to understand the reasons why some individuals decide to create nonprofit organisations instead of for-profit firms and do so under liquidity constraint. The model suggests that non-profit organisations enter at higher optimal levels of production, and are more constrained by access to credit. Moreover, non-profit entrepreneurs are more managerially efficient than their for-profit counterparts. However they cannot allocate capital as efficiently as the for-profit firms would do.

The aim of this article is to investigate the wage differentials between conventional firms and non-worker cooperatives, which has seldom been done in the literature to date. Using French administrative data, the determinants of these wage differentials are analysed. This investigation is carried out across all industries and is then repeated for the banking industry. Taking all industries into account, conventional firms offer lower wages than cooperatives. Most of this pay gap is explained by differences in the characteristics of the employees, jobs and companies. If the focus is narrowed to firms in the banking industry only, it becomes clear that conventional firms pay higher wages than cooperatives but that this gap is explained solely by differences in characteristics. However, their impact is weakened somewhat by differences in the value attributed to these characteristics, which work in favour of employees in cooperatives.