Business cycles and compositional variation in US unemployment

In this article, we study U.S. unemployment dynamics using grouped unemployment data from the Current Population Survey over the period 1968-1992. We estimate a model that traces variation in these unemployment data, both over time and between demographic groups, back to the underlying variation in the inflow and the outflow. In turn, we model the outflow as a transition process in which we allow the exit probabilities to depend on calendar time, duration, and demographic group. We use the estimation results to provide a decomposition of aggregate U.S. unemployment dynamics in various incidence and duration components.