Work Histories and Lifetime Unemployment
- Author(s)
- Iacopo Morchio
- Abstract
A long-standing question in economics is how important unobserved differences across workers are for explaining unemployment. I revisit this topic using variation in lifetime unemployment across workers in U.S. data. A comparison of workers often unemployed with the rest shows that although differences in job-finding rates increase over the course of a career, differences in job-separation rates are large right from the start. I develop a directed search model with symmetric unobserved heterogeneity, in which agents learn workers' types from their labor market histories, to rationalize these findings. The model cannot match the data if unobserved heterogeneity is neglected.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Economics
- Journal
- International Economic Review
- Volume
- 61
- Pages
- 321-350
- No. of pages
- 30
- ISSN
- 0020-6598
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1111/iere.12425
- Publication date
- 2020
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 502002 Labour economics, 502018 Macroeconomics
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Economics and Econometrics
- Sustainable Development Goals
- SDG 8 - Decent Work and Economic Growth
- Portal url
- https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/en/publications/work-histories-and-lifetime-unemployment(66739aeb-1f12-40cb-b79e-7ff9d14e27b3).html