Basic Employment Protection, Bargaining Power, and Economic Outcomes
Basic Employment Protection, Bargaining Power, and Economic Outcomes
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DOI：
10.1561/108.00000045
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发表时间：
2020-01-01
影响因子：
0.9
通讯作者：
Ueda, Kenichi
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Claessens, Stijn;Ueda, Kenichi
我们提出了一个简单的理论，表明基本的就业保护可以改善整个经济的福利，因为它减轻了使企业对工人的承诺不可信的时间不一致性问题。通过在合同条款的重新谈判中向工人倾斜议价能力，基本的就业保护可以激励工人投资于企业特定的人力资本，并使企业保持运营。这与严格的劳动保护形成鲜明对比，后者迫使企业经常破产，并付出经济代价。我们用一项准自然实验来检验这种影响：美国工人在上世纪70年代初至90年代中期获得了基本保护，但各州的年份不同。我们寻求就业保护，以促进知识密集型产业的发展。我们证实了另一个预测，即工人相对于其他利益相关者的议价能力更强，因为同时银行分支机构的放松管制（即银行垄断权力的减少）也有利于知识密集型产业。虽然劳工和金融改革很少被联合调查，但我们证实，在纠正债权人权力（变化）时，基本就业保护的直接积极影响普遍存在，反之亦然。由于研究结果并不适用于研发密集型行业，我们在理论中对企业特定人力资本进行了广义的解释，就像对白领工作一样。
We propose a simple theory suggesting that basic employment protection can improve economy-wide welfare as it mitigates a time inconsistency problem that makes a firm's promise to workers less credible. By tilting the bargaining power in renegotiations on contract terms toward workers, basic employment protection can incentivize workers to invest in firm-specific human capital and allow firms to keep operating. This contrasts to the case of rigid labor protection, which forces firms to go bankrupt too often with economic costs. We test for the effects using a quasi-natural experiment: US workers gained basic protections between the early-1970s and the mid-1990s, but in years varying by state. We find employment protection to benefit the growth of knowledge-intensive industries. We corroborate another prediction that stronger bargaining powers of workers vis-a-vis other stakeholders since contemporaneous bank branch deregulations (i.e., reduction in banks' monopoly powers) also benefit knowledge-intensive industries. Although labor and financial reforms are rarely jointly investigated, we confirm that the direct positive effect of basic employment protection prevails when correcting for (changes in) creditors' powers and vice versa. Since the findings do not maintain for R&D-intensive industries, we interpret the firm-specific human capital in our theory broadly, as for white-collar jobs.