Explaining Non-Negative Duration Dependence Among the Unemployed

Pieter M. Serneels ()

Development and Comp Systems from EconWPA

Abstract: We investigate why we observe non-negative duration dependence among young unemployed men in urban Ethiopia. Assuming that genuine duration dependence is negative, there are five explanations for a non-decreasing hazard: the presence of unemployment benefits, the existence of Active Labour Market Policies, the change in labour demand, segmentation of the labour market, and unemployment as a queuing phenomenon. We test each of these explanations and find that labour market segmentation is the only convincing one. We also establish that genuine duration dependence is indeed negative in the long run.

Keywords: unemployment; duration; segmented labour markets; urban labour market (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J64 C41 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo and nep-lab
Date: 2004-09-15
Note: Type of Document - pdf; pages: 46
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