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WORK HISTORIES AND LIFETIME UNEMPLOYMENT
Author(s) -
Morchio Iacopo
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
international economic review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.658
H-Index - 86
eISSN - 1468-2354
pISSN - 0020-6598
DOI - 10.1111/iere.12425
Subject(s) - unemployment , economics , work (physics) , rest (music) , demographic economics , variation (astronomy) , labour economics , econometrics , economic growth , medicine , mechanical engineering , physics , cardiology , astrophysics , engineering
A long‐standing question in economics is how important unobserved differences across workers are for explaining unemployment. I revisit this topic using variation in lifetime unemployment across workers in U.S. data. A comparison of workers often unemployed with the rest shows that although differences in job‐finding rates increase over the course of a career, differences in job‐separation rates are large right from the start. I develop a directed search model with symmetric unobserved heterogeneity, in which agents learn workers' types from their labor market histories, to rationalize these findings. The model cannot match the data if unobserved heterogeneity is neglected.