How Did the Japanese Employment System Change Investigating the Heterogeneity of Downsizing Practices Across Firms

KIER Discussion Paper Series No. 883, 2014

44 Pages Posted: 27 Mar 2018

See all articles by Sebastien Lechevalier

Sebastien Lechevalier

Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS)

Cyrille Dossougoin

CORE-Université catholique Louvain

Christophe Hurlin

University of Orleans

Satoko Takaoka

Kobe University

Date Written: March 22, 2018

Abstract

Beyond the general issue of institutional change at the aggregate level, some studies have shown that the diversity of Japanese firms has increased since the late 1990s, both in terms of performance and organization. This paper contributes to this literature by investigating the evolving employment practices at the firm level. In mobilizing a database of listed manufacturing firms, we focus on the evolution of the speed of downsizing between the 1990s and the 2000s. A specificity of our paper is that we do not limit our analysis to the introduction of individual effects but we rather resort to a Bayesian estimation procedure, which yields to (firm-specific) individual forecasts of the parameters of the adjustment process modelled with random coefficients. The first major result we get is a decreasing average speed of downsizing, contrary to what is found in a simple estimation with individual effects. Second, we confirm the increasing heterogeneity of Japanese firms between the 1990s and the 2000s, through a rising dispersion of the speed of downsizing. Third, we are able, from a descriptive viewpoint to identify some characteristics of firms with different speed of downsizing.

Suggested Citation

Lechevalier, Sebastien and Dossougoin, Cyrille and Hurlin, Christophe and Takaoka, Satoko, How Did the Japanese Employment System Change Investigating the Heterogeneity of Downsizing Practices Across Firms (March 22, 2018). KIER Discussion Paper Series No. 883, 2014, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3146998 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3146998

Sebastien Lechevalier (Contact Author)

Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) ( email )

54, boulevard Raspail
Paris, 75006
France

HOME PAGE: http://https://sebastienlechevalier.wordpress.com/

Cyrille Dossougoin

CORE-Université catholique Louvain ( email )

Voie du Roman Pays 34
Louvain-la-Neuve,, B-1348
Belgium

Christophe Hurlin

University of Orleans ( email )

Université d'Orléans
Rue de Blois B.P. 6739 45
France

Satoko Takaoka

Kobe University

2-1, Rokkodai-cho, Nada-ku
Kobe, 657-8501, 657-8501
Japan

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