Productivity and wage effects of the Iso9001 certification for leader and laggard companies in Italy

Abstract

In this paper I study whether the adoption of the Iso9001 certification in Italy, between 2011 and 2019, has helped small firms to reduce the gap in productivity, profitability and wages paid to the workers, with the leading group of firms operating on the frontier. After a pooled OLS estimation, a difference-in-difference model with fixed effects has been applied. I find that Iso9001 certification does support firms below the frontier to partially recover the gap in terms of multifactor productivity incorporating the mark-up and profits, while no robust effect has been detected for the mark-up corrected productivity and wages.