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Working Paper
The Role of Observed and Unobserved Heterogeneity in the Duration of Unemployment Spells
This paper studies the degree to which observable and unobservable worker characteristics account for the variation in the aggregate duration of unemployment. I model the distribution of unobserved worker heterogeneity as time varying to capture the interaction of latent attributes with changes in labor-market conditions. Unobserved heterogeneity is the main explanation for the duration dependence of unemployment hazards. Both cyclical and low-frequency variations in the mean duration of unemployment are mainly driven by one subgroup: workers who, for unobserved reasons, stay unemployed for a ...
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Approximating Grouped Fixed Effects Estimation via Fuzzy Clustering Regression
We propose a new, computationally-efficient way to approximate the “grouped fixed-effects” (GFE) estimator of Bonhomme and Manresa (2015), which estimates grouped patterns of unobserved heterogeneity. To do so, we generalize the fuzzy C-means objective to regression settings. As the regularization parameter m approaches 1, the fuzzy clustering objective converges to the GFE objective; moreover, we recast this objective as a standard Generalized Method of Moments problem. We replicate the empirical results of Bonhomme and Manresa (2015) and show that our estimator delivers almost identical ...