REFLECTIONS ON LONG-TERM UNEMPLOYMENT

Usual explanations concerning the wide-spread and mundane nature of long-term unemployment seem often to be both incomplete and uncertain. This article puts forward an explanation based on the combination of a probability effect and a matching effect (one of selection). The first effect indicates that unemployment itself is responsible for generating the long-term unemployed and that the characteristics of job relations, particularly the length, act on the percentage of long-term unemployed in the mass of unemployed. The second effect allows habitual explanation to be measured in terms of selection, disfavoring certain categories, and suggests analysis along other lines to help explain the mundane nature of long-term unemployment : the idea that the firm which is hiring seeks a match not only between the job and the worker but equally between the worker and the group in which he must integrate would seem to be of help in trying to work out the complexities of long-term unemployment.