Youth unemployment duration from the Italian labour force survey: Accuracy issues and modelling attempts

Youth employment in the European Community is distributed very unevenly across countries. The 1986 rates varied from 7.9% in Germany to 25.6% in Italy and 38.4% in Spain. Opportunities and problems in using microdata from the quarterly Italian Labour Force Survey are investigated longitudinally to measure and analyze youth unemployment duration. The survey has a sample rotation scheme that allows longitudinal files to be obtained by matching data on individuals who participate in different surveys; retrospective questions are used to collect data on single spell durations. The data set consists of 683 unemployed individuals in the region of Lombardy over the 2 surveys. A strong negative relationship is found between duration of unemployment at the initial survey and the reporting errors. Using the youth unemployment duration data to analyze the transition probabilities from unemployment to employment, a negative duration dependence is found for both young males and young females.