Are Short-Lived Jobs Stepping Stones to Long-Lasting Jobs?

This paper assesses whether short-lived jobs (lasting one quarter or less and involuntarily ending in unemployment) are stepping stones to long-lasting jobs (enduring one year or more) for Belgian long-term unemployed school-leavers. We proceed in two steps. First, we estimate labour market trajectories in a multi-spell duration model that incorporates lagged duration and lagged occurrence dependence. Second, in a simulation we find that (fe)male school-leavers accepting a short-lived job are, within two years, 13.4 (9.5) percentage points more likely to find a long-lasting job than in the counterfactual in which they reject short-lived jobs.