Financial crisis and hotels’ labour productivity growth: evidence from Spanish islands

ABSTRACT

The article examines hotels’ labour productivity growth over the period of financial crisis. We decompose hotels’ labour productivity into three components: technological change, technological catch-up (efficiency improvement/convergence) and capital deepening. Specifically, we apply our analysis over a sample of 820 Spanish hotels from Balearic and Canary Islands distinguishing three different stages during the crisis period. The results suggest that average terms hotels’ labour productivity was resistant to the financial crisis.

KEYWORDS:

• Labour productivity
• hotel management
• global economic crisis
• convergence

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• D24
• L83

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank an anonymous reviewer of the journal for the useful and constructive comments made to our article. Any remaining errors are solely the authors’ responsibility.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ According to several authors the CRS assumption incorporates several important technological features compared to the variable returns to scale (VRS) assumption (Kuosmanen 2003; Sahoo and Tone 2013).

² Data were collected by companies, thus hotels controlled by the same chain are aggregated into a single unit.