European Sociological Review 4:233-248 1988
© 1988 Oxford University Press
research-article |
Turnover and employment stability in a large West German company
Zentrum für Umfragen, Methoden and Analysen e. V. (ZUMA), P.O. Box 122155, 6800 Mannheim 1, West Germany
Sonderforschungsbereich 333, Konradstraße 6, 8000 Munich 40, West Germany.
This article reports results of an empirical analysis of employment fluctuation. The data bases consist of personnel records of blue-collar workers beginning their jobs in a large West German engineering company in the period 1976 to 1984.
Main emphasis lies on two aspects of employment fluctuation. First, the time pattern of the rate of leaving a firm is discussed. Usually, the risk function, approximately the conditional probability of an employment change, decreases with tenure. However, under certain conditions a non-monotonic, reversed U-shape of the tenure-dependent rate of turnover may arise. If a job is considered as an ‘experience good’, the degree of information of a worker about a new job is supposed to be a relevant factor determining the pattern of the turnover process. This pattern is also different for German in contrast to non-German workers owing to policies of the company to reduce employment in the contraction phase of the firm in the years 1982 to 1984.
The second aspect concerns the determinants of the rate of leaving the firm. Multivariate analysis by event-history methods shows that, contrary to expectation, women's job tenure is longer on average than job tenure for men. Workers' age reduces fluctuation as well as starting wage and wage growth for German workers. In line with standard turnover theory, our results support the hypothesis that increasing wage scales might act as a barrier to employment fluctuation.
Manuscript received: July 1, 1988.