'Take It or Go to Court': The Impact of Sec. 1a of the German Protection Against Dismissal Act on Severance Payments

Laszlo Goerke and Markus Pannenberg

Review of Law & Economics, 2011, vol. 7, issue 2, 377-404

Abstract: In 2004, a section was added to the German Protection against Dismissal Act, establishing a new procedure to dismiss an employee, given a predetermined severance payment. Most legal scholars presume the change to be without impact, while a minority of experts claims it to be either beneficial or unfavorable to employees. Our theoretical model suggests that firms will use the new procedure, but that the change in payoffs is indeterminate and, therefore, an empirical issue. Exploiting the fact that collective dismissals are not directly affected by the amendment, difference-in-differences estimates based on panel data for West Germany indicate that the legal change did have a negative effect on severance pay.

Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.2202/1555-5879.1519 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
Working Paper: 'Take it or Go to Court' - The Impact of Sec. 1a of the German Protection against Dismissal Act on Severance Payments - (2010)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:rlecon:v:7:y:2011:i:2:n:3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/rle/html

DOI: 10.2202/1555-5879.1519

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Law & Economics is currently edited by Francesco Parisi

More articles in Review of Law & Economics from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().