The Class of '81: The effects of early-career unemployment on subsequent unemployment experiences

Simon Burgess, Carol Propper, Hedley Rees and Arran Shearer

Published December 1999

We examine whether unemployment early in an individual's career influences her later employment prospects. We use six years of the LFS to create pseudo-cohorts and exploit cross-cohort variation in unemployment at school-leaving age to identify this. We find heterogeneous responses: for the unskilled, there is evidence of an enduring adverse effect; for the more skilled, there is a small beneficial effect.