 Alternative Labor Retrenchment Laws and Their Effect on Wages and Employment: A Theoretical Investigation with Special Reference to Developing CountriesKaushik Basu,
Gary Fields () and
Shub Debgupta
Working Papers from Cornell University, Center for Analytic Economics Abstract: Many countries have legislation which make it costly for firms to dismiss or retrench workers. In the case of India, the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947, requires firms that employ 50 or more workers to pay a compensation to any worker who is to be retrenched. This paper builds a theoretical model to analyze the effects of such antiretrenchment laws. Our model reveals that an anti-retrenchment law can cause wages and employment to rise or fall, depending on the parametric conditions prevailing in the market. We then use this simple model to isolate conditions under which an antiretrenchment law raises wages and employment. In a subsequent section we assume that the law specifies exogenously the amount of compensation, s, that a firm has to pay each worker who is being dismissed. It is then shown that as s rises, starting from zero, equilibrium wages fall. However beyond a certain point, further rises in s cause wages to rise. In other words, the relation between the exogenously specified cost to the firm of dismissing a worker and the equilibrium wage is V-shaped. JEL-codes: J32 J63 O15 O17 (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ecl:corcae:00-11 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Working Papers from Cornell University, Center for Analytic Economics Contact information at EDIRC. |
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