About one in four workers challenges her dismissal in front of a labor court in France. Using a data set of individual labor disputes brought to French courts over the years 1996 to 2003, we examine the impact of labor court activity on labor market flows. First, we present a simple theoretical model showing the links between judicial costs and judicial case outcomes. Second, we exploit our model as well as the French institutional setting to generate instruments for these endogenous outcomes. In particular, we use shocks in the supply of lawyers who resettle close to their university of origin. Using these instruments, we show that labor court decisions have a causal effect on labor flows. More trials and more cases won by the workers cause more job destructions. More settlements, higher filing rates, and a larger fraction of workers represented by a lawyer dampen job destructions. Various robustness checks confirm these findings.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.