Article 2017

The scars of youth: Effects of early-career unemployment on future unemployment experience

International Labour Review
Journal · Vol. 156 · Issue 3-4 · pp. 465-494
Abstract

Does early-career unemployment cause future unemployment? The authors approach this question using German administrative matched employer–employee data that track almost 700,000 individuals over 24 years. Instrumenting early-career unemployment with firm-specific labour demand shocks, they find significant and long-lasting “scarring effects”. In the mean, each additional day of unemployment during the first eight years on the labour market increases unemployment in the following 16 years by half a day. However, quantile regressions show that the scarring effects are much stronger for individuals who already suffer from lengthy and repeated spells of unemployment. © © The authors 2017 Journal compilation © International Labour Organization 2017

Keywords

Author Keywords

Job insecurity youth unemployment Germany labour demand Frictional unemployment

Index Keywords

Germany labor market unemployment demand analysis young population
Author Affiliations
Institute for Employment Research, Nuremberg, Nurnberg, Bayern, Germany
The World Bank, USA, Washington, D.C., United States
Funding & Acknowledgements
No funding information
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