Employment resilience and business organization: the case of Italian micro firms

Testing resilience has become a widespread exercise in socio-economic literature, especially in the wake of macroeconomic shocks. Among the key factors driving the resilience of economic systems, we explore the role of business organizations, focusing on the cooperative model. Leveraging on data from Italian micro firms covering the period 2012–2022, which hosts the COVID-19 pandemic, we compare the employment resilience of cooperative enterprises with capitalist ones. Our findings suggest that while cooperative enterprises may appear to exhibit lower employment resilience compared to capitalist firms, they demonstrate greater resilience when accounting for changes in the number of firms. Additionally, our study found that cooperative enterprises consistently feature a higher ratio of labour cost to value added compared to capitalist firms, with the differential significantly increasing over the analysed period. Overall, our study highlights the growing relevance of cooperative organizations in shaping employment dynamics and labour productivity, emphasizing their distinct contributions amidst economic downturns.