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Exceptions to Employment at Will: Raising Firing Costs or Enforcing Life-Cycle Contracts?

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Author Info
Max Schanzenbach
Abstract

The common law doctrine of employment at will holds that, unless specified otherwise, the employment relationship can be terminated for any reason. Beginning in the mid-1970s, many state courts became willing to find exceptions to this doctrine. A possible benefit of this new approach is that it provides a third-party enforcement mechanism to implicit labor contracts. This article uses two large micro data sets on employee tenure and wages to evaluate the impact of exceptions to employment at will. Although the results suggest that exceptions to employment at will affected labor markets, there is little evidence that exceptions helped enforce implicit contracts. Copyright 2003, Oxford University Press.

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Publisher Info
Article provided by Oxford University Press in its journal American Law and Economics Review.

Volume (Year): 5 (2003)
Issue (Month): 2 (August)
Pages: 470-504
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Handle: RePEc:oup:amlawe:v:5:y:2003:i:2:p:470-504

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  1. David H. Autor & William R. Kerr & Adriana D. Kugler, 2007. "Do Employment Protections Reduce Productivity? Evidence from U.S. States," IZA Discussion Papers 2571, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
  2. Benito Arruñada & Veneta Andonova, 2004. "Judges' Cognition and Market Order," Economics Working Papers 768, Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, revised Jan 2008. [Downloadable!]
  3. W. Bentley MacLeod & Voraprapa Nakavachara, 2006. "Legal Default Rules: The Case of Wrongful Discharge Laws," IZA Discussion Papers 1970, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). [Downloadable!]
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This page was last updated on 2009-11-19.


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