Job Security Laws and Structural Change in the Japanese Labor Market

There are a number of indications that Japanese job security laws have been relaxed since the end of the 1990s. The purpose of this paper is to establish causality between job security laws and firing costs in the Japanese labor market. The analysis first investigates when and how firing costs changed, and then compares the timing of these changes in firing costs with those of job security laws. The results indicate that gradual changes in firing costs began in about 1992, lagging one or two years behind the bursting of the bubble economy, while job security laws started to change towards the end of the 1990s.