This paper uses job seekers’ elicited beliefs about finding to disentangle the sources of decline in job-finding rates by duration unemployment. We document that have strong predictive power for finding, but are not revised downward when remaining unemployed and subject optimistic bias, especially long-term unemployed. Leveraging beliefs, we find substantial heterogeneity with resulting dynamic...

Dive duration in air-breathing vertebrates is thought to be constrained by the volume of oxygen stored in the body and the rate at which it is consumed (i.e., "oxygen store/usage hypothesis"). The body mass-dependence of dive duration among endothermic vertebrates is largely supportive of this model, but previous analyses of ectothermic vertebrates show no such body mass-dependence. Here we sho...

We use a regime-switching model of real GNP growth to examine the duration dependence of business cycles. The model extends Hamilton (1989) and Durland and McCurdy (1994) and is estimated using both the postwar NIPA data and the secular data constructed by Balke-Gordon. We find that an expansion is more likely to end at a young age, that a contraction is more likely to end at an old age, that o...

We discuss several tests for duration dependence, and establish a few theoretical relationships among the tests that we examine. Some of our test statistics are new to the econometrics literature, and we make an important distinction between the discrete and continuous time frameworks. We then test for duration dependence in business and stock-market cycles, and compare our results for business...

We develop a simple dynamic model of a worker’s transitions between employment and non-employment. Our model implies that a worker finds a job at an optimal stopping time, when a Brownian motion with drift hits a barrier. The model has structural duration dependence in the job finding rate, in the sense that the hazard rate of finding a job changes during a non-employment spell for a given work...