Volume 24, Number 1 (Winter) 1989
Coleman, Thomas S. 1989. "Unemployment Behavior: Evidence from the CPS Work Experience Survey." Journal of Human Resources 24(1):1-38.
This paper discusses the nature and uses of data on individual unemployment experience available from the Current Population Survey (CPS). The purpose of the paper is two-fold: first, to describe the general statistical process generating such data and then to assume a specific, tractable, stochastic process by which the data could have been generated; and second, to carefully determine what, is anything, these data can tell us about the nature of unemployment. The conclusions from the empirical analysis are two: First, entry rates into unemployment and differences in entry rates across people are more important that spell levels of unemployment. Second, there appear to be some inconsistencies between inferences drawn from the experience data and those drawn from other data sets.
The author is an assistant professor of economics at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, currently on leave at the Bank of Boston. He would like to thank Yoram Weiss, Alan Harrison, and anonymous referees for suggestions, but retains responsibility for errors and omissions.
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