노동계약에 관한 법경제학적 분석 - 한국의 해고판례를 중심으로 = Law and Economics in Labor Contracting

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Since the early 1990s, the Korean courts have tilted in the direction of giving greater freedom to employers by relaxing the restrictions on dismissal for economic reasons. During the Korean economic crisis of 1998, the Korean Labor Standard Act was also revised for the purpose of relieving the limitation of employer`s discretion in employment adjustment. From the Coasian perspective, this article analyze how implied contracts for the employee`s reliance and employer`s compliance might be influenced after the formal law is revised. We demonstrate that, if the legal change results in excessive intervention, it might cause the employers to over-breach, the employees to under-rely, and the accompanying efficiency to decrease. We scrutinize the total population of unjust dismissal cases since 1987 in order to investigate how the legal changes in Korea have affected the implied contracts. Our empirical analysis raises a possibility that Korean legal changes made in 1990s might have increased the employer`s opportunism and decreased the employer`s reliance effort.