The political economy of employment protection

Gilles Saint-Paul

Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Abstract: This paper develops a model of job creation and job destruction in a growing economy with embodied technical progress, that we use to analyze the political support for employment protection legislations such as the ones that are observed in most European countries. We analyze the possibility of Condorcet cycles due to the fact that workers about to become unemployed prefer both an increase and a reduction in firing costs over the status quo. Despite this problem, we show the existence of local, and sometimes global majority winners. In voting in favour of employment protection, incumbent employees trade off lower living standards (because employment protection maintains workers in less productive activities) against longer job duration. We show that the gains from, and consequently the political support for employment protection (as defined by maximunjob tenure) are larger, the lower the rate of creative destruction and the larger the worker's bargaining power. Numerical simulations suggest a hump- shaped response of firing costs to these variables, as well as negative impact of exogeneous turnover on employment protection.

Keywords: Vintage capital; obsolescence; political economy; firing costs; creative destruction (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E24 E6 J3 J6 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1999-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pbe, nep-pke and nep-pol
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

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Related works:
Journal Article: The Political Economy of Employment Protection (2002)
Working Paper: The Political Economy of Employment Protection (1999)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:upf:upfgen:355

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