Common law exceptions to employment at will and U.S. labor markets

Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization

Volumn 16, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 74-101

  Miles, Thomas J ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO   (United States)

^b AMERICAN BAR FOUNDATION   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0034418363     PISSN: 87566222     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/jleo/16.1.74     Document Type: Article

References (73)

1. For example, one legal commentator has stated, "Employers have been going crazy about damages they've had to pay" (Bernstein, 1988: 68).
2. For a more complete discussion of the content of these legal rules, see, among others, Employment Coordinator (1997), Oliver and May (1986) and Finkin, Goldman, and Summers (1989).
3. Many of these cases are filed in state courts which report few detailed statistics on their caseloads (National Center for State Courts, Brian Ostrom, personal communication, June 24, 1997). While data on federal court caseloads are somewhat more complete, figures on filings under common law exceptions to employment at will, or even employment law more generally, are not available (see Administrative Office of U.S. Courts).
4. Only one state, Montana, had legislation on unjust termination during the sample period. However, because that state has a tradition of codifying in legislation the precedents set by its state courts, the 1987 passage of the act was a response to its courts having previously recognized exceptions. Krueger (1991) argues that employers will favor such laws if they limit damage recoveries, and employer support for a 1996 Arizona act that limited damages in public policy cases provides further evidence for his claim (BNA, 1996). While Montana was included in the estimation of results presented below, excluding it from the sample did not affect the results.
5. Because California adopted the public policy exception in 1959, prior to the sample period, it is excluded from the duration analysis.
6. The standard errors reported have been corrected for correlations within regions.
7. Since several of the models discussed in Section 3 predicted that firing costs reduce the amplitude of employment’s cyclical fluctuations, changes in employment and the absolute value of those changes were also used as dependent variables. Because the estimated effects were small and statistically insignificant, they are not reported here in order to conserve space.
8. An analogous set of regressions was estimated on state unemployment rates. Consistent with the earlier results, the estimates were statistically insignificant, their impacts small, and consequently, they are not reported here.
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