Dismissals and contractual termination: analysis and empirical evaluation of employer behavior.

Summary This thesis proposes an empirical analysis of employers' behavior in the use of dismissal, for economic and personal reasons, and of the rupture conventionnelle (Re). The objective is to better characterize the actual practices of employers in their use of these different termination methods over the period 1999-2009, in order to renew the economic analysis of labor law rules by proposing a more inductive approach. In the first part of the paper, we show that the social representations of the methods of breaking open-ended contracts held by employees and employers, and above all their actual use by employers, make the boundaries supposed to delimit these legal categories permeable. The empirical determinants of the use of each of these categories are intertwined, so that it is first of all the varying degree of influence of these determinants that makes it possible to identify different models of termination. The second part of the paper first traces the historical and institutional development of breakaway practices, described as "negotiated", and whose principal figure today is the CR. Then, it evaluates the effects of the introduction of CR on the behaviour of employers by testing the hypotheses, based on the theoretical literature, that CR would facilitate, on the one hand, the termination of the employment relationship and, on the other hand, could replace dismissal, which has become more expensive and more risky. The empirical results essentially validate the first hypothesis.