Unemployment duration in Germany: A comprehensive study with dynamic hazard models and P-Splines

This paper makes use of data from the German socio-economic panel to gain new insights into the determinants of unemployment duration in Germany. Due to substantial differences with respect to labour market outcomes we follow a stratified approach with respect to gender and ethnicity. To analyze unemployment duration comprehensively, dynamic duration time models are used in which covariate effects are allowed to vary smoothly with unemployment duration and others enter the model in an a-priori unspecified functional form. We control for unobserved heterogeneity by following a modern frailty approach. As fitting routine we use penalized spline smoothing effects using available software in R. We demonstrate with state-of-the-art regression models how effects of covariables change, either over duration time or within their range and reveal substantial differences across gender end ethnicities for the German labour market. Among others we find large effects of family characteristics for women and a minor importance of formal qualifications for immigrants.