論文
早期退職制度による離職行動－ある企業の事例研究－
2004 年 6 巻 2 号 p. 2-13
詳細
2004 年 6 巻 2 号 p. 2-13
It is known that when companies try to reduce their employees by voluntary retirement schemes, the low-ability employees tend to choose to stay while high-ability ones tends to leave. Theoretically, this problem has been analyzed as an adverse selection problem caused by the asymmetric information on the employees’ ability. Some studies have showed that the adverse selection would occur unless the profile of the severance payment is set to give the low-ability employees the information rent.
This paper investigates the hypothesis using a case of a middle-sized Japanese company which carried out the employment adjustment by a voluntary retirement scheme in 1998. The investigation consists of some interviews with the human resource division and econometric analyses using the personnel data of the company. Besides, the employees who were informally persuaded to leave are excluded from the samples in order to make the analysis only for the choices which were certainly made voluntarily.
The main analysis is separated in two econometric tests. What is tested first is that whether the voluntary retirement scheme gives the low-ability employees the additional rent or not. Secondly, the difference of the ability level between the leavers and the stayers is tested. Two conclusions can be expected from the theoretical studies. If it is confirmed that the severance payment system present the rent to the low-ability employees in the first test, these people will be observed as the leavers in the second test. Otherwise, the adverse selection will be found out on the difference of the ability.
As the result of these tests, this company’s case was turned out to be the one which fit to the first expected conclusion. That is, it was shown that the voluntary retirement scheme was designed in which the low-ability employees were given relatively high compensation to leave, and they tended to leave with higher probability than the high-ability ones. This case can be regarded as an empirical evidence of that the adverse selection can be restrained by proper mechanism design to cause the voluntary choice which is desirable for each ability type.
