Employer Cooperation, Productivity and Wages: New Evidence from Inter-Firm Formal Network Agreements

Using uniquely rich administrative matched employer–employee data for Italy from 2008 to 2018, we investigate the impact of firms’ formal network agreements (FNAs) on firm performance and employee wages. We find an overall significant and economically relevant positive effect of FNAs on various measures of firm performance, but there are no tangible benefits for the workers, and wages decrease slightly, on average. There is, however, marked heterogeneity in the impact on both firms and workers. Estimated rent-sharing equations, as well as other tests that exploit unionization data, suggest that the negative effects on wages can be explained by a decrease in workers’ bargaining power following the introduction of FNAs.