WORK HISTORIES AND LIFETIME UNEMPLOYMENT

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Morchio, Iacopo
• 署名单位: University of Vienna
• 刊物名称: INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC REVIEW
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0020-6598
• DOI: 10.1111/iere.12425
• 发表日期: 2020
• 页码: 321-350
• 关键词: labor-market; search; job; INFORMATION; selection; duration; mobility

摘要

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.