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FIRM PERFORMANCE and INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXT: a THEORETICAL EXPLORATION with EVIDENCE from the ITALIAN COOPERATIVE SECTOR Doctor O

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FIRM PERFORMANCE and INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXT: a THEORETICAL EXPLORATION with EVIDENCE from the ITALIAN COOPERATIVE SECTOR Doctor O FIRM PERFORMANCE AND INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXT: A THEORETICAL EXPLORATION WITH EVIDENCE FROM THE ITALIAN COOPERATIVE SECTOR F. GAGLIARDI Doctor of Philosophy 2009 FIRM PERFORMANCE AND INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXT: A THEORETICAL EXPLORATION WITH EVIDENCE FROM THE ITALIAN COOPERATIVE SECTOR FRANCESCA GAGLIARDI Submitted to the University of Hertfordshire in partial fulfilment of the requirement of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2009 To my sisters Giovanna and Laura ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks to my supervisors Professor Geoffrey M. Hodgson and Dr. Ya Ping Yin for stimulating discussions, for their timely, critical but supportive comments on successive drafts, and for their encouragement. Their intellectual and professional influence on me has been profound. I believe that the awarding of the Horvat- Vanek Prize (14th Conference of the International Association for the Economics of Participation, Clinton, New York) for the papers that form the basis of Chapters 6 and 7 of this thesis is much a recognition of the contribution and influence of the above scholars as the arguments contained therein. I am also indebted to Dr. Francesco Trivieri for additional comments and unstinting support over a long period of time. I am grateful to the participants of the following conferences, seminars and workshops at which earlier papers that formed the drafts of various chapters were presented: European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy 2009 Annual Conference, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 6-8 November 2009; European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy 2008 Annual Conference, Rome, Italy, 6-8 November 2008; 14th Conference of the International Association for the Economics of Participation, Clinton, New York, United States, 15-17 July 2008; Laboratoire D’Economie de la Firme et des Institutions 2007 Conference, University of Lyon II, Lyon, France, 19-21 November 2007; European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy 2007 Annual Conference, Porto, Portugal, 1-3 November 2007; European School on New Institutional Economics, Cargese, Corsica, 21–25 May 2007; University of Hertfordshire Business School Research Seminar Series, 7 May 2008; Centre for Research in Institutional Economics PhD Student Workshop, University of Hertfordshire, 16 January 2008, 23–24 January 2007, 19 January 2006. Financial support for participating at the above conferences has been kindly provided by Professor Mick Broadbent, my Head of Department, and Dr. Susan Grey, Director of Research Degrees. I am very grateful to both. Thanks also to several anonymous referees for insightful comments and suggestions on the research papers that form the basis of Chapters 6 and 7. Despite the benevolence of so many, writing is still an unsociable business. Yet both my parents, Margherita and Eugenio, and my sisters, Giovanna and Laura, have provided remarkable support. Finally, the personal and emotional support that I received from friends and fellow PhD students at the Business School is acknowledged with deepest thanks. ABSTRACT This thesis examines the relationship between institutional context and firm performance, from both a theoretical and empirical perspective. The aim is to engage with the debate seeking to explain the observed diversity in the forms of economic organisation prevailing in socio-economic systems. The focus of the empirical work is on investigating the effects of the structure and behaviour of banking institutions on firm performance, in the Italian context. The analysis is comparative in the sense that confronts cooperative and capitalist business structures. The analytical framework is institutionalist in emphasising the institutionally embedded nature of economic performance, and the historical and cultural dimensions of economic behaviour. The institutional complementarity approach is used to investigate the hypothesis that the relative performance of different firm structures is context dependent. The main conclusions are that the economic performance of cooperative firms is strongly conditioned in a sense of institutional complementarity by the degree of development and competition characterising the financial domain. Rejected are the pessimistic predictions of conventional accounts that democratic firms are unequivocally unviable. Instead, there are relations of context dependency, of institutional complementarity that influence the viability of firm types. The overall conclusion is that the dynamics governing the evolution of socio- economic systems are much more complex than mainstream economics suggests; productive organisations may assume a multiplicity of forms. The theoretical claims of a universalistic history in which all production systems must follow the same line of development must be abandoned. This brings about major policy implications at the regional, national and international levels. CONTENTS List of Tables ix CHAPTER 1 Introduction 1 Background to research 1 2 Negative and positive feedback: What implications for economics? 2 3 Recognising patterned diversity in complex socio-economic systems 9 4 The scope of the thesis 11 5 The structure of the research work 13 PART I TOWARDS AN ECONOMICS WHERE CONTEXT AND HISTORY MATTER CHAPTER 2 Varieties of capitalism: From unidimensional to institutional views 1 Introduction 24 2 The unidimensional focus of comparative economic systems 26 3 Institutional views of varieties of capitalism 31 4 Hall and Soskice’s varieties of capitalism 34 5 Régulation theory 37 6 Whitley’s comparative business systems approach 45 7 Theoretical explanations of diversity in capitalist configurations 51 8 Conclusion 54 v CHAPTER 3 The institutional complementarity approach and its significance for economics 1 Introduction 60 2 The notion of complementarity: Meaning, origins and applications 63 2.1 The concept of institutional complementarity 63 3 Detecting institutional complementarities 67 4 The theoretical analysis of institutional complementarities 70 5 The empirical evidence on institutional complementarities 77 6 Conclusion 87 CHAPTER 4 The cooperative firms in the economic literature: A critical evaluation 1 Introduction 93 2 The short-term equilibrium: Ward’s model and its extensions 95 3 The monitoring activity in the cooperative firm 103 4 The long-term behaviour: The issue of capital accumulation 107 4.1 Internal financing and the underinvestment problem 108 4.2 External financing 110 4.3 Empirical studies on the financing of cooperative firms 114 5 The population density of cooperative firms between (in)efficiency claims and context dependence 115 6 Conclusion 119 CHAPTER 5 The democratic firm and the wider institutional context 1 Introduction 124 2 Origins of the cooperative ideology and economists’ attitude 125 3 The democratic firm in Central and Eastern Europe 127 3.1 The ex-Yugoslav experience 128 vi 3.2 Cooperative firms in Poland 131 3.3 The effects of privatisation 132 4 The changing fortunes of the UK cooperative sector 135 5 The experience of Belgium, Denmark and the Netherlands 137 6 The Japanese cooperative sector 139 7 Cooperation in France 141 8 The Italian case 142 9 Spain: A success story 146 10 The U.S. experience 148 11 Conclusion 150 PART II DEVELOPING AN EMPIRICAL CONTRIBUTION TO THE INVESTIGATION OF INSTITUTIONAL COMPLEMENTARITIES CHAPTER 6 Banking market structure, creation and activity of firms: Early evidence for cooperatives in the Italian case 1 Introduction 156 2 Banking market structure and entrepreneurship: A brief literature review 159 2.1 Cooperative firms and the relationship with external financiers: Theory and evidence 164 3 Empirical question and methodology 167 3.1 Measuring firm birth and activity 169 3.2 Measuring bank market power 170 3.3 Estimation methods 171 3.3.1 The Tobit model 172 3.3.2 The econometric specifications 174 4 Data 178 5 Results 180 5.1 Robustness 185 6 Conclusion 188 vii CHAPTER 7 Financial development and the growth of cooperative firms 1 Introduction 195 2 The role of financial development: A review of the literature 198 2.1 The external financing of Italian cooperative firms 204 3 Empirical question and methodology 206 3.1 Measuring firm growth 207 3.2 Measuring local banking development 208 3.3 The econometric specification 209 4 Data 213 5 Results 215 5.1 Sensitivity analysis 218 6 Conclusion 225 CHAPTER 8 Conclusion 1 Introduction 232 2 Banks’ behaviour, incentives and the performance of the democratic firm 233 3 Rethinking the economic theory of the democratic firm and the implications for economic analysis 236 4 Policy conclusions 237 5 Future research agendas 238 REFERENCES 240 viii LIST OF TABLES 2.1 Comparing approaches to Varieties of Capitalism 50 6.1 Description of variables 176 6.2 Summary statistics 176 6.3 Correlation matrix 177 6.4 Cooperative firms’ birth and activity rates results 184 6.5 Non-cooperative firms’ birth and activity rates results 184 6.6 Robustness: Including market fixed effects 186 6.7 Marginal effects and threshold values for firms' birth and activity rates 187 7.1 A taxonomy of the literature on financial development 202 7.2 Description of variables 211 7.3 Summary statistics 211 7.4 Correlation matrix 212 7.5 Estimation results 216 7.6 Robustness: checking for endogeneity and including new regressors 220 7.7 Robustness: changing the dependent variable 222 7.8 Robustness: clustering on provinces 223 7.9 The impact of BRANCH on GROWTH when COOP=1 224 ix CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION 1 BACKGROUND TO RESEARCH The broad aim of this thesis is to examine the factors that contribute to explain the
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