Non-regular Employment in Japan from the 1980s

https://www.grips.ac.jp/list/jp/facultyinfo/fujimoto-junichi/In Japan, unstable jobs have increased substantially since the 1980s. While a number of studies explore the source of increase in non-regular employment and its implications, there are still many issues to be uncovered. In this paper, we use the Japanese Labour Force Survey and Labour Force Survey Special Survey microdata to examine how the types of employment have shifted since the 1980s for workers disaggregated by age, gender, and marital status. In particular, we use two different concepts used in Japan to categorize worker by job security, one based on how the job is called at the workplace and the other based on the length of the contract, to obtain a fuller picture of job stability in Japan and its evolution over time. Our analysis reveals that the share of insecure jobs has increased in Japan since the 1980s widely across workers and firms of different characteristics.JEL Classification Codes: E24, J63, J64Esteban-Pretel acknowledges nancial support provided for this project by a PSC-CUNY Award, jointly funded by the Professional Sta Congress and the City University of New York (Award #63128-0051). Fujimoto acknowledges nancial support for this project by Grants-in-Aid for Scienti c Research of the JSPS (Kakenhi No. 26780114 and No. 18K01505), Nomura Foundation, and GRIPS Policy Research Center