Whereas employee participation is generally conceived to facilitate implementation of organizational change, only limited research has investigated whether it may reduce the negative effects of downsizing. The present study compares two Swedish hospitals that implemented downsizing in different...

In the late 1980s privatization and down-sizing of nationalized steel mills and related firms in the metal industry have lead to large-scale redundancy plans. A special Steel Foundation was created as part of a social plan. This foundation acted like an independent training center, where...

Firms are affected by the product demand. This leads to employment adjustments. In the literature we find only very few contributions investigating the issue whether internal adjustments are linked and which relationships exist with external adjustments. Are they of a complementary or...

In public discussion in Germany it is often argued that jobs are mainly created in small and medium-sized firms (i.e. the "Mittelstand"), whereas large firms tend to reduce their number of jobs. An empirical analysis for the period 1999 to 2005 with data of all western and eastern German firms...

The objective of this article is to study the behavior of German HR managers in the wake of the global crisis. Some criticize them as humble hangmen who simply execute the orders of top management—killing jobs and laying off people. Others praise them as intelligent problem solvers who did an...

This paper aims to provide a frame of mind to understand the link between structural change and regional unemployment, and, based on it, to survey the most recent literature. An overly optimistic view on the ability of the adjustment mechanism to generate convergence in local unemployment rates...

We exploit homogeneous firm level data of manufacturing and non-manufacturing sectors to study the impact of firing restrictions on job flow dynamics across 14 European countries. We find that more stringent firing laws dampen the response of job destruction to the cycle, thus making job...