Neodualism in the Italian business firms: training, organizational capabilities, and productivity distributions

What has been the dynamics of productivity in the Italian business firms in the aftermath of the crisis? And what has been the impact of training efforts upon such dynamics? In this work, we address these questions exploring a unique Italian micro-level dataset which links information on the amount and the nature of training and firm balance-sheet data. First, we document what we call a neodualist tendency with a leader-laggard dynamics entailing a widening support of the productivity distributions. Second, we analyze the relationship between productivities and training intensities by means of quantile regression analysis. There is indeed some relationship in the whole sample which however gets much weaker when disaggregating by sector and by size. Moreover, hardly any dynamic relationship appears, either between initial training intensities and subsequent productivity changes or between changes in both variables. Our results do not imply that training is not important, but that its effectiveness must be shaped by the interaction with other firm-specific characteristics, associated with idiosyncratic organizational capabilities.