Denis Fougere

Individual Labour Market Transitions

During the last ten years, the micro-econometric analysis of individual transitions has been extensively used for investigating some of the major problems inherent in the functioning of contemporary labour markets, such as the relations between individual mobility and wages, the variability of flows between employment, unemployment and non-employment through the business cycle, or the effects of public policies (training programs, unemployment insurance, etc.) on individuals patterns of unemployment. Typically, labour market transition data register sequences of durations spent by workers in the following states: employment, unemployment and non-employment. When individual participation histories are completely observed, through panel or retrospective surveys, the econometrician disposes of continuous-time realizations of the labour market participation process. When these histories are only observed at many successive dates, through panel surveys, the available information is truncated; more precisely it takes the form of discrete-time observations of underlying continuous-time processes. Our presentation of statistical procedures used for analysing individual transition or mobility histories is based on the distinction between these two kinds of data.