Employment policies at the plant level : job and worker flows for heterogeneous labour in Norway

Abstract

Despite the large degree of plant-specific heterogeneity in turnover patterns recently found in the gross job and worker literature, very little is known about the sources of the heterogeneity in plant level employment policies. The present paper, studies in detail the employment management policies for heterogeneous plants and for heterogeneous labour, using a matched worker-employer data set for Norway. Within an econometric framework, I find that the job and worker flows above job changes are different processes since job destruction and reemployment separations have distinct patterns over the business cycle. The two turnover processes also differ over worker types. Further, strong influences of firm and plant size on the patterns are found, as are effects from wage policies, age of plants, market power and union density. Interestingly, the influence of firm size on reemployment separations disappears when the combined effect of market power and high union density is modelled.