The impact of labour force histories on future employment

Abstract

Using Austrian social insurance data from 1997 to 2015, this paper extends existing research into labour market histories, which indicated that breaking down the working histories of individuals gave further insight into how past employment status would affect future employment. With 5-month panels taken from the Austrian Labour Market Database, the employment histories were decomposed into five main categories: employment; unemployment; childcare/parental leave; minor employment; and other insured non-employment. One main finding shows that being out of the labour force, a category which is less attached to the labour force than the unemployed, was in fact a good measure for future employment in 1997. However, since then this effect has fallen dramatically. Another outcome indicates that if an individual is on parental leave, the likelihood of gaining employment started low in 1997 and has also experienced a steep decline. In addition, results seem to demonstrate that, while past employment has a not unexpected large effect on future employment, that it too has fallen alongside other factors, indicating that job finding rates have fallen for all individuals since 1997. The advantage of this paper is the depth and breadth of the dataset, which allows for a more detailed analysis of individual histories.