Joanna Landmesser, Ph.D., Econometrics and Statistics, Warsaw University of Life Sciences, ul. Nowoursynowska 166, Warszawa, 02-787, Poland
The aim of this paper is to analyze the duration of unemployment periods in the rural and urban population using the survival analysis. The hazard model can be a suitable tool for the analysis of unemployment period duration. Estimating the risk model we calculate the direct risk of leaving the unemployment in the next instant. A dependent variable is going to be probability of transition from unemployment state to employment state. Hazard models usually comprise not only present duration of the phenomenon as a significant determinant for the probability of its occurrence, but also other observable characteristics of individuals as gender, age, marital status, place of residence, education level, occupation, length of the last job, level of disability. We are putting forward the following main hypotheses which are going to be verified using hazard models: old age gives smaller re-employment possibilities; women are less likely to be employed than man; higher and longer education gives bigger employment possibilities. We try to find differences between economic activity of people in rural and urban areas. Studying unemployment duration we propose introducing the changing regional labor market structure into our event history models too (the models will include time-dependent covariates, e.g. regional unemployment rate). For the estimation, we use data from the District Labor Office in Slupsk in Poland from January 1990 to July 2007.