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Our main purpose is to test the unemployment invariance hypothesis in Italy.

This paper provides an empirical investigation of the unemployment and labor force participation in Italy.

Cointegration analysis results strongly suggest a clear long-run relationship between unemployment and labor force participation revealing a persistent and general added worker effect.

Our results seem to confute the unemployment invariance hypothesis.

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the effects of human resource management (HRM) practices on firm outcomes at the firm level in Vietnam.

The paper employs a fixed-effects framework for the estimation using a panel sample of manufacturing firms from small- and medium-sized enterprise surveys between 2009 and 2013.

The paper finds that, on average, a firm that provides the training for new workers gains roughly 13.7, 10 and 14.9 percent higher in output value per worker, value added per worker and gross profit per worker, respectively, than the counterpart. Moreover, an additional ten-day training duration for new employees on average leads to a 4.1 percent increase in output value per worker, a 3.0 percent rise in value added per worker and a 3.0 percent growth in gross profit per worker. The paper also uncovers that a marginal 10 percent of HRM spending results in about 2 and 1.6 percent rises in output value per worker and value added per worker, respectively.

Using the case of Vietnam, this paper shows the important roles of HRM practices in explaining firm outcomes.

In Italy, worker cooperatives (WCs), whose workers hold major control rights over collectively-owned assets, are the leading vehicle for the promotion and development of employee ownership. Worker cooperatives are present in all regions and in most economic sectors, employing about 506,000 workers and generating a turnover of about €22 bn. Despite their history and diffusion, the high prevalence of WCs in Italy is under-researched and -thematised and requires new research.

The paper leverages unpublished primary and secondary data from Centro Studi Legacoop databank, the Aida-Bureau Van Dijk databank and the Cooperative Registry of the Ministry of Economic Development (CRMED) to explain the spread of WCs in Italy.

This paper reveals descriptive statistics of WCs and investigates their distribution across economic sectors and regions, their economic and financial performance and gives an overview of the relevant legislation. The paper indicates that older small- and medium-sized cooperatives located in central and north-eastern Italy perform best economically. However, in recent years, an increasing number of young cooperatives has emerged in South Italy thanks to favourable legislation, cooperative finance and the diffusion of cooperative know-how. Limitations to such results are reported in the conclusions.

The paper sheds light on past and recent development trends of WCs in Italy, highlights their growth in South Italy and revitalises the debate on the drivers, structures and rationales of employee-owned enterprises in Italy. Findings generate implications for research and practice. Given the tendency of WCs to better protect jobs than investor-owned enterprises, the spread of these enterprises may help workers find better and more stable jobs, counter-cyclically mitigating the dangerous effects of macro- and meso-economic fluctuations and instability.

In this study, the authors examine whether social capital embedded in individuals' social networks is connected to employees' long-term income development in Finland.

Analyses are based on 25–35-year-old employees from the Finnish Living Conditions Survey of 1994 combined with register data on earned incomes from 1995 to 2016. The authors used questions addressing the frequency of meeting parents or siblings, spending free time with co-workers and participation in associational, civic or other societal activities as measures of the extent of network capital. Ordered logistic model was used to examine whether the size and composition of social networks differ by gender and socio-economic status. Linear growth curve models were employed to estimate the effect of social capital on long-term income development.

Results indicate minor differences in network composition according to gender, but large differences between socio-economic groups. The authors found that income development was faster for those who participated in civic activities occasionally or who met their relatives or co-workers on a monthly basis, that is, for the “middle group”.

Results are generalizable only to Finnish or Nordic welfare state context. The authors’ measures of social capital come from cross-sectional survey. Thus, the authors are not able to address the stability or accumulation of social capital during life course. This restriction will probably cause the authors’ analysis to underestimate the true effect of social capital on earned incomes.

Moderate-level investments to network capital seem to be the most beneficial with regard to the long-term income development.

The study results give support to the idea that social capital can be transformed into economic capital. The results also imply that in economic terms it is important to balance diverse forms of social capital. At the policy level, a special emphasis should be directed to employees with low-socio-economic position. These people are especially vulnerable as their low level of income is combined with network composition that hinders their further income development.

The combined survey and register data give unique insight on how the social capital embedded in individuals' social networks is connected with long-term income development.

This paper aims to study the type of short-time work (STW) schemes implemented in Spain to preserve jobs and workers’ incomes during the COVID-19 crisis and the corresponding labour market outcomes.

A dynamic macroeconomic model of job creation and destruction of the search and matching type in a dual labour market.

The model shows that the availability of STW schemes does not necessarily prevent a large increase in unemployment and job destruction. The quantitative effects depend on the degree of subsidization of payroll taxes and on the design of the policy. A scenario with a moderate degree of subsidization and where the subsidy is independent of the reduction in hours worked is the least harmful for both welfare and fiscal deficit. The cost of such a strategy is a higher unemployment rate. Concerning heterogeneous effects, the unemployed are the ones who experience the strongest distributional changes.

The effectiveness of STW schemes in dual labour markets using a search and matching model in the context of the COVID-19 crisis has not been analysed elsewhere. The literature has emphasized the importance of dynamics, labour market institutions and workers’ heterogeneity to understand workforce adjustment decisions in the face of temporary shocks to de- mand especially when firms’ human capital is relevant. These elements are present in the model. In addition, this paper computes welfare and distributional effects and the cost of these policies.

The purpose of this paper is to pinpoint some key variables that help shape the notion of older workers as a source of organizational wisdom capital.

Toward that end, the paper reviews a selective bibliography in order to support its arguments.

The evidence garnered throughout this paper – fundamentally through different lens of analysis – suggests that older workers may be considered as valuable assets. Furthermore, a sizeable number of members of this cohort continue, even in the latter stages of their careers, to be willing, well-equipped, and able to enhance, if properly utilized, companies to achieve other patterns of performance. Accordingly, it is advocated here that their knowledge and expertise constitutes an authentic source of organizational wisdom capital that deserves careful attention from organizations to maintain by means of suitable incentives and training.

This paper highlights other aspects that should not be disdained by organizations such as career-ending, work characteristics, and mastery-avoidance goals. Thus, companies that are interested in keeping older talents must be attuned to their wishes and aspirations, as well as being proactive by offering tailor-made job-products to them.

Given the trend of aging workforce, it is likely that organizations will be increasingly impacted by societal demands and public policies toward benefiting and respecting older talents.

This paper advocates that older workers are usually living memories of organizational life. Rather, they tend to keep in their minds those failures and successful ideas, projects, initiatives, and leaderships, which added or not value throughout their trajectories, as well as things that worked out or not. Fundamentally, they are able to provide answers to vital questions.

Both the academic literature and practitioners have long noted the need for an equity investment mechanism for worker-controlled firms that alleviates investor anxieties without undermining internal workplace democracy. The purpose of this paper is to outline one such possible mechanism.

The proposal locks together the interests of workers and external investors, via non-voting shares with dividends set by a pre-agreed value-added sharing formula. Each worker is paid a base wage, with the average across the firm being a pre-defined multiple of the national minimum wage. Any additional surplus is split into a number of equal “slices”, with each share receiving one slice as its dividend, and the average worker receiving a pre-agreed number of slices as a bonus.

Workers have an incentive to maximise their own incomes, and in so doing, will also automatically maximise the dividends received by investors, obviating the need for the shares to have normal voting rights. Working on this principle of aligned interests, the authors also discuss reinvestment, worker ownership of non-voting shares and possibilities for a secondary share market. The authors show how this proposal will be a significant step in aligning the interests of investors with owner-workers in a democratic, negotiated way that shares both risk and returns, thus making worker-controlled firms more attractive to equity investment.

In light of the recognised problem of underinvestment in worker-controlled firms and the risk of their degeneration, this paper will interest both academics and practitioners in employee ownership, co-operatives and various forms of workplace democracy.

Ongoing automation processes may render a fair share of the existing jobs redundant or change their nature. This begs the question to what extent employees affected invest in training in order to strengthen their labour market position in times of uncertainty. Given the different national labour market regimes and institutions, there may be an important geographical dimension to the opportunities to cope with the challenges set by automation. The purpose of this study is to address both issues.

Using data from the 2016 European labour Force Survey, the authors estimate with logit and multi-level regression analyses how the automation risk of a worker's job is associated with the propensity of following non-formal education/training. The authors allow this relationship to vary across European countries.

The results show that employees in jobs vulnerable to automation invest relatively little in training. Also, there are significant differences across Europe in both the provision of training in general and the effect of automation on training provision.

While there is quite a lot of research on the structural labour market effects of automation, relatively little is known about the actions that employees take to deal with the uncertainty they are faced with. This article aims to contribute to our understanding of such mechanisms underlying the structural macro-level labour-market dynamics.