Andreas Mueller, University of Zürich

“The Nature of Long-Term Unemployment: Predictability, Heterogeneity and Selection”

Abstract

This paper studies the predictability of long-term unemployment (LTU) using rich administrative data from Sweden. We establish substantial heterogeneity in LTU risk across individuals, accounting for both observed and unobserved heterogeneity using a wide range of observable predictors and multiple spell outcomes respectively. We apply our prediction algorithm to study the
dynamics of job finding over the unemployment spell and the business cycle. Selection effects can explain most of the decline in average job finding over the unemployment spell, but little of its cyclicality. We also find sizeable heterogeneity in the profiles of job finding over the unemployment spell, but not so over the business cycle.

Andreas I. Mueller holds the Professorship for Macroeconomics and Labor Markets at the Department of Economics at the University of Zurich and is an Affiliated Professor at the UBS Center for Economics in Society.

Prior to joining the University of Zurich, he was an Associate Professor at UT Austin and Columbia Business School. Mueller received his doctorate from the IIES, Stockholm University, and was awarded the Arnbergska Prize for his dissertation work by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. His research spans a broad spectrum of issues in macroeconomics, labor economics, and monetary economics and has been published in leading academic journals such as the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Journal of Political Economy and the Review of Economic Studies and covered in the Economist, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Financial Times.

Professor Mueller is a Research Affiliate at the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), a Research Fellow at the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), an Associate Editor at the Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics (SJES) and an Associate Editor at the Journal of Monetary Economics (JME).

You can read more about Andreas Mueller here

CEBI contact: Søren Leth-Petersen