Japanese industrial relations are often seen as being characterized by permanent employment, seniority wages, and a high level of inequality between workers in large and small firms. These characteristics of the Japanese labor market may be vanishing as Japan is becoming a highly industrialized, mass society. If that is the case, then it should have implications for the mobility of workers within and between firms and for the level of earnings inequality between workers in large and small firms. This project will address these issues by analyzing the Japanese Surveys of Social Stratification and Mobility from 1955, 1965, and 1975. These data span four decades of rapid industrialization and economic growth for Japan. The investigator will use econometric models to analyze the data. He will examine whether between-firm mobility of workers has become more common over time, and whether the earnings determination process still is dominated by the existence of seniority wages. This study will be an important addition to the literature on the Japanese labor market because it examines whether the rapid industrialization and strong economic growth of the last four decades have replaced the practices of permanent employment and seniority wages by productivity-based wage determination more similar to the patterns known from the American labor market.
