Unemployment Hysteresis by Sex and Education Attainment in the EU

Abstract

In this paper, we analyse the degree of persistence of shocks in unemployment rates for a group of 22 European countries, disaggregating the data by sex and education attainment. By means of using a long-memory model with fractional integration techniques, we find high levels of persistence in the majority of the cases with orders of integration which are around 1. Also, we find that women and those with higher education are the ones which shocks tend to have less lasting effects since they refer to the series with the lowest orders of integration, in some cases being significantly below 1 and thus showing mean reversion. Policy implications are derived from our analysis.