Most governments are now dealing with ageing by increasing the age requirements for retirement. Even though the stricter requirements may keep the workers longer in the labour market, however they raise concerns about firms profitability as older workers tend to be less productive and, at the same time, costlier.
Then firms have to rebalance productivity and labour costs of a workforce which is getting older and older.
Recent years have witnessed a large spread of what is currently named "company welfare" (CW) or "welfare aziendale", that is benefits provided by employers to the employees as a result of a unilateral initiative or of a firm-level agreement with unions.
This project focuses on the possible role of CW to help firms to cope with the ageing of the workforce.
The first, theoretical research question is "which reasons make the firms willing to bear the costs of a CW scheme? and how the benefits and costs of CW are actually shared, through wage bargaining or other mechanisms, with the employees?". This question is approached through a theoretical, model-based analysis.
The second, empirical research question is about the determinants of CW "which firm's and workforce characteristics increase the likelihood of adopting a CW scheme"? does an older workforce increase the firm's propensity to CW?".
In particular we verify whether the 2011 Pension Reform (Legge Fornero), which caused a sudden increase in the share of older employees in many firms, motivated these firms to introduce a CW scheme as a response to this change.
The underlying assumption is that the CW schemes may be helpful in increasing productivity of older employees.
A counterfactual analysis is applied as the increase in the share of old employees caused by the reform represents the treatment. The following techniques are implemented to cope with possible endogeneity issues: probit model with instrumental variables, propensity score matching (PSM), diff-in-diff.
