Abstract
As labour markets have become more complex there has been increasing interest among researchers in understanding the ways that social and labour market processes and contexts impact on various labour market states. One important area has been in understanding the differences between unemployment and hidden unemployment. This paper considers the ways in which these two labour market states differ for a sample of male and female respondents to the Household Income and Labour Dynamics Australia (HILDA) survey. It presents data related to the reasons why respondents in these two labour force states consider they are jobless and analyses the characteristics of male and female respondents in the two labour market states to consider differences in outcomes. The findings suggest that there are differences in the two states of labour market outcomes and that these are further complicated when one considers processes for males and females.
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Notes
In multinomial logit model, one of the response categories is taken as the reference case and then we use this case to compute the log-odds for all other response categories relative to it. Thus the constant term is the multinomial logit estimate for unemployed relative to the reference category (adequately employed) when the explanatory variables are evaluated at zero. Typically we would mean-centre the explanatory variables so the constant applicable to unemployed gives the logit of being unemployed versus adequately employed (reference category) when the explanatory variables take their average values.
We recognise that the social network variable is potentially problematic as we don’t know if respondents have low social contacts before they became unemployed or hidden unemployed, or because they are unemployed or hidden unemployed.
Job opportunities reflect the perceived level of job opportunities given by respondents. While the respondents may have had these perceptions prior to becoming out of work, it is equally likely to be the case that low perceptions may be a result of the jobless state.
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Baum, S., Mitchell, W.F. Labour Underutilisation and Gender: Unemployment Versus Hidden-Unemployment. Popul Res Policy Rev 29, 233–248 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-009-9137-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-009-9137-6