UNEMPLOYMENT DURATION AND BUSINESS CYCLE IN ARGENTINA. A QUANTILE REGRESSION ANALYSIS

MAURIZIO, ROXANA; MONSALVO, PAULA

Los Polvorines, Pcia. de Buenos Aires

Congreso; Sextas Jornadas de Mercado de Trabajo y Equidad en Argentina; 2007

Instituto de Ciencias. Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento

Argentina constitutes an interesting case for the analysis of the labour market given that during the nineties it reached high economic growth rates and a stable macroeconomic environment together with a significant raise in unemployment. This dynamic was associated to increases in the entry flows to unemployment and the average duration of these episodes. The proportion of long-term unemployment also grew significantly. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, to evaluate the presence of differential effects of the business cycle and changes in the productive structure on unemployment hazard rates along the elapsed unemployment duration of the spells. Second, to test the validity of the proportional assumption imposed in most of the studies about unemployment duration as well as to propose the use of an alternative econometric method. Censored quantile regressions will be used in order to estimate in a more flexible and robust way the effect of covariates on the conditional distribution of duration. This is the first study in applying this methodology to unemployment duration in Argentina. The results indicate that the reduction of the labour opportunities implied an increase in unemployment duration, especially for those unemployed with long-term episodes. As a consequence, the long unemployment spells became even longer during the period under analysis.