Un modello di mistura per l'analisi della disoccupazione di lunga durata

In recent years, specifically in western European countries, it has been observed a notable increase in the number of people showing long duration of job search spells, and this aspect seems to concern mostly some specific groups of the population. Significantly, it has become very common to report besides the unemployment rate the level of long-term unemployment as an important index on the situation of labour markets. In this work a class of mixture models is developed, in order to allow for the coexistence of different distributions of unemployment in the population. These models make possible an interpretation of long-term unemployment allowing for: (a) the estimation of the duration model referred only to individuals with some opportunity of transition to employment, thus eliminating the bias due to the joint estimation of the mixture of two different populations; (b) pointing out the distinctive features (as age, gender, education) related to the disadvantaged side of the population. An empirical application of mixture models on a longitudinal sample coming from the rotating sample structure of the Italian labour force survey is presented, also considering the correction to take into account problems related to length bias.