Asset Accumulation and Short Term Employment

Martin Browning, Thomas Crossley () and Eric Smith

Department of Economics Working Papers from McMaster University

Abstract: If access to credit is limited (especially when young or unemployed) but ”bad” jobs are easy to come by, then job seekers might use short term employment in undesirable jobs as a way to finance consumption during subsequent unemployed search for a “good” job. In this paper we explore this idea in two ways. First, we document empirical patterns of short term employment and asset accumulation among job seekers. Second, we build a theoretical model of job search by risk averse, credit constrained agents. In this model we are able to demonstrate analytically that voluntary planned quits can occur as agents cycle between accumulating assets in short term employment and unemployed search for more desirable employment.

JEL-codes: D83 D91 J64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 57 pages
Date: 2002
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/econ/rsrch/papers/archive/2002-14.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Asset Accumulation and Short Term Employment (2007)
Working Paper: Asset Accumulation and Short Term Employment (2003)
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:mcm:deptwp:2002-14

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Department of Economics Working Papers from McMaster University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().