Unemployment Persistence: Is There Evidence for Stigma Effects?

Martin Biewen and Susanne Steffes

No 08-057, ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research

Abstract: We present evidence for a highly significant interaction between state dependence in individual unemployment risk and the business cycle. The disadvantage from having been unemployed in the previous period is smaller in times of relatively high unemployment and larger in times of low unemployment. This is consistent with the existence of stigma effects in the sense that unemployed individuals face difficulties finding a new job because employers interpret unemployment as a negative signal and do so especially when it is easier to find jobs, i.e. when unemployment is low.

Keywords: Unemployment persistence; state dependence; human capital depreciation; stigma effects; scarring (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 J64 J65 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ias and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/24753/1/dp08057.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Unemployment persistence: Is there evidence for stigma effects? (2010)
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:zbw:zewdip:7380

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().