from lawsuits that conclude as a settlement or as a court ruling.

# IV Data

We have assembled a data set comprised of a random sample of procedures ...led between 1990 and 1998 in two tribunals in the Mexican federal labor court system. We sampled from tribunal 15, which covers the pharmaceutical, chemical, paper, automotive and auto parts industries, and from tribunal 6, which covers the textile industry.<sup>32</sup> For tribunal 15, we randomly selected 150 case ...les from each year from 1991-1998, with the exception of the year 1992 from which we sampled 215 case ...les. For tribunal 6, we sampled 75 case ...les from each year from 1990-1997.<sup>33</sup> There are two main types of procedures: ...led settlements and lawsuits. For ...led settlements, there is only one statement of facts made jointly by the employer and the employee, and resolution of the procedure is always settlement. Lawsuits contain the employee’s claim, the employer’s answer (if the employer chooses to answer), the terms of settlement reached if the case settles, and the terms of the court’s ruling if the case is not settled. Many suits include multiple plainti¤s and are treated as correlated data points in the statistical analysis. In this section we describe the main variables relating to the lawsuit, worker and employer information, and resolution of the con‡ict.

For all procedures ...led in our sample, we observe the motive for ...ling,<sup>34</sup> the date of ...ling, the geographical location of the dispute, and whether the procedure is a settlement or a lawsuit. With respect to information collected from the worker’s ...ling, we have information about the type of job held,<sup>35</sup> the date the job started and ended, the salary with and without fringe bene...ts, hours worked per week, the worker’s demands,<sup>36</sup> as well as worker gender, date of birth, and sometimes the worker’s social security ID number.<sup>37</sup> With respect

> 32 These data were obtained by the authors using a new law governing freedom of governmental information in Mexico. Although some of the variables used in this study are considered to be public information under the law, other variables are not public information, and have been obtained under a con...dentiality agreement between the Federal Labor Courts System and the authors.

> 33 For tribunal 15, the total number of case ...les was 973 in 1991, 951 in 1992, 1020 in 1993, 865 in 1994, 902 in 1995, 722 in 1996, 672 in 1997, and 795 in 1998. For tribunal 6, the total number of case ...les was 728 in 1990, 699 in 1991, 700 in 1992, 860 in 1993, 690 in 1994, 574 in 1995, 414 in 1996, and 403 in 1997.

> 34 Most procedures in our sample are related to a ...ring. A few suits do not dispute the ...ring decision but claim incomplete severance pay or incomplete payment of fringe bene...ts. There are also a few pension cases.

> 35 Although the claim speci...es the actual job description, we only use this to classify workers as standard employees or as at-will (supervisory) employees, who are entitled to higher severance pay under the labor law.

> 36 In ...ring law suits, workers generally demand reinstatement, back-pay, overtime, fringe bene...ts, and severance pay.

> 37 The presence of the ID number allows us to link the data from the lawsuit to con...dential data on the worker’s employment records available from the Mexican social security administration. The latter data tell us the wage reported for the worker since 1985, as well as an identi...er for the worker’s employer, the industry and the location of the worker. For

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