IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bes/jnlbes/v3y1985i2p118-28.html

How Long Is a Spell of Unemployment? Illusions and Biases in the Use of CPS Data

Author

Listed:
  • Kiefer, Nicholas M
  • Lundberg, Shelly J
  • Neumann, George R

Abstract

Most data used to study the durations of unemployment spells come from the Current Population Survey, which is a point-in-time survey and gives an incomplete picture of the underlying duration distribution. We introduce a new sample of completed unemployment spells obtained from panel data and apply CPS sampling and reporting techniques to replicate the type of data used by other researchers. Predicted duration distributions derived from this CPS-like data are then compared to the actual distribution. We conclude that the best inferences that can be made about unemployment durations using CPS-like data are seriously biased.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Kiefer, Nicholas M & Lundberg, Shelly J & Neumann, George R, 1985. "How Long Is a Spell of Unemployment? Illusions and Biases in the Use of CPS Data," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 3(2), pages 118-128, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:bes:jnlbes:v:3:y:1985:i:2:p:118-28
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jacoby, Sanford M. & Sharma, Sunil, 1992. "Employment Duration and Industrial Labor Mobility in the United States, 1880–1980," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 52(1), pages 161-179, March.
    2. Yang, Zhenlin & Tsui, Albert K., 2004. "Analytically calibrated Box-Cox percentile limits for duration and event-time models," Insurance: Mathematics and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 35(3), pages 649-677, December.
    3. Haroon Bhorat & David Tseng, 2012. "The Newly Unemployed and the UIF Take-up Rate in the South African Labour Market," Working Papers 12147, University of Cape Town, Development Policy Research Unit.
    4. Francisco J. Gil & Maria Jesus Martin & Angel Serrat, 1994. "Movilidad en el mercado de trabajo en España: un análisis econométrico de duración con riesgos en competencia," Investigaciones Economicas, Fundación SEPI, vol. 18(3), pages 517-537, September.
    5. Villagarcía, Teresa, 1992. "Measuring the effects of covariates on duration data through completely censored and lengith biased cps-like data," UC3M Working papers. Economics 2840, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Departamento de Economía.
    6. Bowles, Roger Arthur & Florackis, Chrisostomos, 2007. "Duration of the time to reconviction: Evidence from UK prisoner discharge data," Journal of Criminal Justice, Elsevier, vol. 35(4), pages 365-378.
    7. Ignez M. Tristao, 2007. "Occupational Employment Risk and its Consequences for Unemployment Duration and Wages: Working Paper 2007-01," Working Papers 18287, Congressional Budget Office.
    8. Lester Lusher & Geoffrey C. Schnorr & Rebecca L.C. Taylor, 2022. "Unemployment Insurance as a Worker Indiscipline Device? Evidence from Scanner Data," American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Association, vol. 14(2), pages 285-319, April.
    9. Jones, Stephen R G & Riddell, W Craig, 1995. "The Measurement of Labor Force Dynamics with Longitudinal Data: The Labour Market Activity Survey Filter," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 13(2), pages 351-385, April.
    10. Alfred Garloff & Stefan Werth, 2013. "Characterizing unemployment duration data with stock sample measures," ERSA conference papers ersa13p849, European Regional Science Association.
    11. Bindler, Anna, 2016. "Still unemployed, what next? Crime and unemployment duration," Working Papers in Economics 660, University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics.
    12. Anthony Shorrocks, 2009. "Spell incidence, spell duration and the measurement of unemployment," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 7(3), pages 295-310, September.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bes:jnlbes:v:3:y:1985:i:2:p:118-28. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Christopher F. Baum (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.amstat.org/publications/jbes/index.cfm?fuseaction=main .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.