Unemployment In Austria: job losing and job finding

Abstract

This thesis uses Austrian administrative data to analyze the evolution of the unemployment rate and the associated job losing and job finding probabilities. Following a recent paper by Hornstein (2012), the rates are split up between shortand long term unemployment to further identify movements in the Austrian labor market. I use a logistic regression model with seasonal dummy variables to estimate the transition probabilities between employment and unemployment. In alignment with Hornstein (2012), the results indicate that the job losing rate increases in recessions while the job finding rate decreases. Moreover, the job total finding probability has a downwards trend over the observed period. A further interesting result, following the literature, is the increase of long-term unemployed as a share of the overall unemployment pool during recessions.