U.S. Unemployment Duration: Has Long Become Longer or Short Become Shorter?

Pedro Portugal and José António Machado
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Juliana Guimaraes Cavalcanti

Working Papers from Banco de Portugal, Economics and Research Department

Abstract: The U.S. labor market has been experiencing unprecedented high average unemployment duration. The shift in the unemployment duration distribution can be traced back to the early nineties. In this study, censored quantile regression methods are employed to analyze the changes in the US unemployment duration distribution. We explore the decomposition method proposed by Machado and Mata (2005) to disentangle the contribution of the changes generated by the covariate distribution and by the conditional distribution. The data used in this inquiry are taken from the nationally representative Displaced Worker Surveys of 1988 and 1998. We provide evidence that the change in the unemployment duration distribution is mainly produced by the opposing effects of a sharp rise in job-to-job transition rates and an increased sensitivity of unemployment duration to unemployment rates. Compositional changes in the labor force played a limited role. We rationalize our findings by arguing that improved screening technology is likely to be the relevant underlying mechanism at work.

JEL-codes: C14 C21 C41 J64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.bportugal.pt/sites/default/files/anexos/papers/wp200613.pdf

Related works:
Working Paper: U.S. Unemployment Duration: Has Long Become Longer or Short Become Shorter? (2007)
Working Paper: U.S. Unemployment Duration: Has Long Become Longer or Short Become Shorter? (2006)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ptu:wpaper:w200613

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Banco de Portugal, Economics and Research Department Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by DEE-NTD (estudos@bportugal.pt).