An Attempt to Evaluate the Impact of Reorganization on the Way Working Time Reduction has Been Implemented by French Firms Since 1996

Abstract

In this paper, we assess whether the fact that a French firm is reorganized could influence the date it chooses to implement a working time reduction (WTR), as well as other variables included in the WTR administrative surveys' agreements, like the WTR type of device (offensive/defensive) the company adopts, the number of workers it commits to hire, and if it benefits or not from incentives. We first consider as reorganized, a firm that uses at least two organizational production devices (among others: Just In Time, Total Quality and People Involvement devices). We merge two surveys, one dealing with organizational characteristics within the firm (COI - Changements Organisationnels et l'Informatisation, 1997) and the other containing information on WTR agreements (Robien, Aubry I or II). After presenting some stylized facts about WTR variables and modeling the probability for a firm to be reorganized, we implement various matching estimators (simple nearest match, kernel and re-weighting ones) to evaluate the causal effect of reorganization on the considered WTR variables. We find that WTR (Robien as Aubry I or II) may favour reorganized firms, since the latter would: i) implement earlier a WTR; ii) be more likely to adopt an offensive device; iii) commit to more job creation; and iv) not necessarily benefit more often from incentives.