Are Unemployment and Out of the Labor Force Behaviorally Distinct Labor Force States?

Christopher Flinn and James Heckman

No 979, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper formulates and tests the hypothesis that the categories unemployed and out of the labor force are behaviorally distinct labor force states. Our empirical results indicate that they are. In the empirically relevant range the exit rate from unemployment to employment exceeds the exit rate from out of the labor force to employment. This evidence is shown to be consistent with a simple job search model of productive unemployment with log concave wage offer distributions. We prove that if unemployed workers receive job offers more frequently than workers out of the labor force, and if wage offer distributions are log concave, the exit rate from unemployment to employment exceeds the exit rate from out of the labor force to employment.

Date: 1982-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab and nep-ltv
Note: LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published as Journal of Labor Economics, Vol. 1, no. 1 (January 1983): pp. 28-42.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w0979.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Are Unemployment and Out of the Labor Force Behaviorally Distinct Labor Force States? (1983)
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:nbr:nberwo:0979

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w0979

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().