Studying the relationship between unemployment periods in Spain: a nonparametric approach

Abstract

The effect of successive periods of unemployment according to household type has not been analysed in any depth with respect to the Spanish labour market. In this article, we propose a nonparametric methodology based on a data-driven likelihood ratio function to describe the dependence between the duration of successive periods of unemployment according to different household typologies. This study, which uses a very large data set, specifically, the Spanish sample of the European Community Household Panel (ECHP), first reveals a weak dependence between the consecutive unemployment durations in the case of the most frequent household typology. In addition, we find that the first months of the previous spells of unemployment have a significant impact on subsequent expected unemployment duration.

Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by Consolidated Group of the Government of Aragon ‘nonparametric models for biased data in the labour market’ and grant CICYT-MTM 2005-01464.