In an effort to explore various difficulties in the process of reemployment, the focus of this study is how, to what extent, and in what way length of unemployment duration is generated by the interplay between the structural characteristics of the labor market and the individual characteristics of unemployed workers. The structural resources are conceptualized in terms of (1) different types of reemployment, and (2) economic sectors. It turns out that the insertion of labor market structures into research on unemployment duration is quite valuable in improving our understanding of individual reemployment behavior. / The findings show that reemployment through job recalls is relatively easier than through job switches. Even though many unemployed workers remained to benefit from the structural buffer of internal labor markets in their struggle for reemployment, workers losing core-sector jobs are found to have more difficulty in switching to a new job relative to those losing peripheral jobs. The finding illustrates a critical weakness of internal labor markets in reallocating unemployed workers. / Furthermore, the impact of the labor market location of lost jobs is also observed in both the manner and the extent to which the individual attributes of unemployed workers affect the process of reemployment. (1) More education substantially improves the reemployment chances of workers losing core-services jobs, but not workers unemployed from other sectors. (2) The reemployment probability of workers losing core-services jobs is increased with an improvement in general education whereas the reemployment probabilities of workers losing core goods-production jobs tend to increase with an accumulation in firm-specific skills. (3) Men tend to maintain their reemployment advantage through their access to internal labor markets whereas women improve their reemployment probability by benefiting from job expansion in service industries. (4) Experienced core-service workers tend to have a shorter unemployment duration than young ones when their jobs are available for recall, whereas experienced peripheral goods production workers often have a competitive disadvantage in switching to a new job. And (5) UI benefits slow down the job-recall rate substantially but have little impact on the individual behavior of searching for a new job. The problem of timing termination of unemployment duration to coincide with exhaustion of UI benefits is much more severe for the job-recall rate than for the job-switch rate.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.36641 |
| Date | January 1999 |
| Creators | Lou, Zhijian, 1957- |
| Contributors | Smith, Michael (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of Sociology.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001746879, proquestno: NQ64607, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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