Unemployment duration, job search and labour market segmentation Evidence from urban Ethiopia

Pieter Serneels

No 2008-17, CSAE Working Paper Series from Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford

Abstract: Although it is a common theoretical assumption that the chances to find a job fall with time in unemployment, this is not systematically confirmed by empirical evidence, and there is no evidence for developing countries. We develop a framework that allows us to test the four major explanations why we may observe non-negative duration dependence while genuine duration dependence is negative: financial support for the unemployed, active labour market policies, a change in the economy over time, and segmentation of the labour market into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ jobs. Using data for urban Ethiopia we observe a constant hazard while controlling for unobserved heterogeneity, and find that labour market segmentation is the only convincing explanation.

Keywords: unemployment; duration dependence; segmented labour markets; urban labour market (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C41 J64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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