Time Out of Work and Skill Depreciation

Per-Anders Edin and Magnus Gustavsson

No 2004:14, Working Paper Series from Uppsala University, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper investigates the role of skill depreciation in the relationship between work interruptions and subsequent wages. Using a unique longitudinal dataset, the Swedish part of the International Adult Literacy Survey, we are able to analyze changes in literacy skills for individuals as a function of time out of work. In general, we find statistically strong evidence on a negative relationship between work interruptions and skills. Our analysis suggests that depreciation of general (literacy) skills is economically significant. Our estimates imply that a full year of non-employment is associated with skill losses that are equivalent to moving 5 percentiles down the skill distribution.

Keywords: Work interruptions; Skill depreciation; Unemployment; Wage differentials (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J13 J24 J31 J69 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2004-09-28
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mon and nep-rmg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Published in Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 2008, pages 163-189.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nek.uu.se/pdf/wp2004_14.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.nek.uu.se/pdf/wp2004_14.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.nek.uu.se/pdf/wp2004_14.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.uu.se/institution/nationalekonomiska/pdf/wp2004_14.pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Time Out of Work and Skill Depreciation (2008)
Working Paper: Time out of work and skill depreciation (2005)
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:hhs:uunewp:2004_014

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Uppsala University, Department of Economics Department of Economics, Uppsala University, P. O. Box 513, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ulrika Öjdeby ().