한국 기업의 고용조정속도에 관한 연구

Study on Employment Adjustment for Korean Firm -A Base for Comparative Study for Korean-Japan-

Using the firm-level panel data from 1991 to 2006, we analyzed the change of korean firms` employment adjustment under the implementation of labor market flexibility policy after financial crisis in 1997 and the change of given condition for global market and technology. Our empirical results show that speed of Korean firms` labor adjustment became faster than before financial crisis. We could interpret this finding as increasing labor market flexibility after finacial crisis. However the speed is various as industry. After the financial crisis, we could find that the adjustment speed of light industries became faster but heavy industries became slower. The reason why heavy industries became slower is that employment adjustment to attain the optimal production is not need to be achieved by domestic production or employment, in the circumstance allowing of abroad production and intermediate goods import. These results imply that policy of labor market flexibility affected light industries but did not affect the heavy industries including mainstay industries for Korea.