This paper examines the impact of the business cycle on school-leaving decisions in France for the period 1983-2009. Business cycle effects are twofold. On the one hand, bad economic conditions reduce the opportunity cost of schooling and may induce higher school participation. On the other...

How many workers are confined indefinitely in a labor cycle, moving back and forth from temporary jobs to nonemployment periods without the potential to secure a steady job? To answer this question, we develop a mixture of four Markov chains, each of them modeling a specific type of labor market...