This paper studies the evolution of job stability in West Germany. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we first show that the median elapsed tenure declined for men between 1984 and 1999. Second, estimating proportional Cox hazard models with competing risks and controls for stock...

This contribution investigates severance payments for dismissed employees in Germany. Subsequent to an overview about the legal framework, we respond to the following questions: Who receives severance payments? By which characteristics is the level of severance payments determined? Is...

We here consider the effect of the level of income that individuals consider to be fair for the job they do, which we take as measure of comparison income, on both subjective well-being and objective future job quitting. In six waves of German Socio-Economic Panel data, the extent to which own...

Using representative German employee data, we analyse the role of works councils for the incidence of severance payments subsequent to dismissals. While there is a positive relation with severance payments after those dismissals which stem from plant closings, the incidence of a works council is...

West Germany's Employment Promotion Act of 1985 facilitated the use of fixed-term contracts and increased the number of dismissals above which the employer is required to establish a "social plan" (involving severance payments). I assess the effect of this reduction in "firing costs" on...

In the case of collective redundancies, employers are forced to regard certain characteristics when deciding who is going to be dismissed. This paper develops a procedure to derive an empirical based weighting scheme between the characteristics relevant for this selection (age, disability,...