Econometric Analysis of CPS-Type Unemployment Data

Analysts studying the unemployment experiences of population members often have access to data collected from a sample of individuals at a point in time which contain the length of the ongoing spell of unemployment for sample members currently unemployed. No information regarding the lengths of ongoing employment spells is collected. This paper considers how such information may be utilized in the estimation of parameters of alternating renewal process models of labor market attachment, in the presence of both observed and unobserved population heterogeneity. A number of models are presented, and estimation is carried out using a CPS-type data set from Italy