2003) The Heterogeneity of Employment Adjustment across Japanese Firms. A Study using Panel Data, Couverture orange du CEPREMAP n

Since the beginning of the 1990s, there has been a sharp debate in Japan on the end of lifetime employment. On one side, case studies show the intensity of restructuring and downsizing. On the other side, most of the studies on the employment adjustment at a macro level conclude to the absence of change. This article contributes to this debate, using an original micro database. The first specificity of this paper is to focus on the electrical machinery sector in a panel framework. The current restructuring in this sector is indeed often analyzed as the sign of the changing employment adjustment and, more generally, of the employment system. The second specificity is to consider a long enough period to make a comparison between the 1990s and the 1970s. The first major result is the increasing heterogeneity of the speed of employment adjustment at the level of the firms. Thus, we can explain the contradictory evaluation of the change of the mean speed and disentangle the micro-macro paradox. The second main result concerns the analysis of the characteristics of the firms affecting the speed of adjustment and the factors at the root of the increasing heterogeneity. The model of adjustment seems to have changed: the size tends to play a decreasing role, while the financial characteristics, like the intensity of the link with the Main Bank, are more and more important. Last but not least, the role of these financial factors may be the main explanation of the increasing heterogeneity of the employment adjustment. This last result has however to be confirmed and specified by future studies. ∗We are sincerely grateful to professors Uni Hiroyuki (Kyoto University), Suzuki Hiromasa (Waseda Uni-versity) and Hirota Isao (Tokyo University) for providing us the access to the NEEDS-FQ database. As fa