Abstract
The intention of this chapter is to examine the distribution of employment and unemployment among individual workers. By and large, the literature has dealt with differences in aggregate unemployment rates by demographic groups and with the distribution of unemployed workers by duration of unemployment. In contrast with these ways of looking at unemployment, this chapter concentrates on the size distribution of employment. This distribution is described by a cumulative distribution function for the proportion of a particular group that is unemployed less than or equal to an amount of time x in a period of length t. While the duration of unemployment is simple to model mathematically (at least when transition rates are constant), the proportion of the time spent employed is complicated by the possibility of multiple transitions between employment and unemployment. The appropriate probability density functions are developed in section 4. Related to the description of the size distribution of employment is the question of how unequally unemployment is distributed. That is, how unequally is the burden of unemployment distributed among the population, and how much of this inequality is the result of random outcomes?
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1985 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sattinger, M. (1985). The Distribution of Employment. In: Unemployment, Choice and Inequality. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-70547-2_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-70547-2_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-70549-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-70547-2
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive