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Title: Unemployment Experience of Individuals Over a Decade
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Parnes, Herbert S. |
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Unemployment Experience of Individuals Over a Decade Kalamazoo, MI: Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, 1982 Cohort(s): Mature Women, Older Men, Young Men, Young Women Publisher: W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research Keyword(s): Employment; Labor Force Participation; Mobility; Unemployment; Unemployment Duration; Unemployment Rate Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. Large proportions of individuals with labor force exposure experience some unemployment over a ten-year period: majorities of young men and women and three or four out of ten of the older groups. In the NLS unemployment is very unevenly distributed within each of the cohorts: ten percent of the unemployed who had the longest cumulative durations accounted for between 35 and 40 percent of all the unemployment that occurred during the decade under review. When those with no unemployment are also considered, the five percent of all individuals with the most unemployment accounted for over one-half of all unemployment among the older men and between 29 and 45 percent in the other three cohorts. Unemployment means not only the lost earnings attributable directly to the periods of enforced idleness, but leads also to long term reductions in earning capacity, especially among the younger men and women. Multivariate analysis reveals that the characteristics that bear the strongest and most consistent relationship with the incidence and/or duration of unemployment are educational attainment, occupational and industrial affiliation, interfirm mobility, and length of service in the job held at the beginning of the decade. These factors account for only small proportions--10 to 25 percent--of the total variation in unemployment experience. A substantial amount of unemployment experience appears to result either from being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or from personality characteristics that generally go unmeasured. The extreme concentration of unemployment among relatively small proportions of labor market participants is cause for concern, in view of the evidence that unemployment produces a long term deterioration in earning capacity. On the brighter side, the temporal distribution of chronic unemployment is similar to that of total unemployment and both are responsive to variations in general economic conditions which tends to dispel the most pessimistic interpretations of structural unemployment. On the theoretical level, the findings make suspect modern neoclassical interpretations based on search theory, according to which all unemployment is really voluntary. |
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Bibliography Citation
Parnes, Herbert S. Unemployment Experience of Individuals Over a Decade. Kalamazoo, MI: Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, 1982. |