Organizational Size, Layoffs, and Quits in Norway

This article documents and seeks to explain the relationships between an organization's size and a person's probability of experiencing interorganizational mobility (i.e., quits and layoffs). Our analyses are based on datafrom a broadly representativepanel study of Norwegian organizations and their employees. We find that employees of larger establishments in the private sector are less likely to be laid off and to quit theirjobs. We then testpossible explanations of these relationships between organization size and mobility. Wefind that larger organizations in the private sector have lower quit rates mainly because they are more likely to be unionized. The relationship between size and layoffs, on the other hand, remained significant even after we controlled for our explanatory variables. There was no relationship between size and quits in the public sector.

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