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Discussion of Reinhard Hujer and Hilmar Schneider: "Unemployment duration as a
function of individual characteristics and economic trends"
Olaf Hübler
(1) The unemployment duration analysis is one of the tra-
ditional economic applications in event history analy-
sis. There exist several studies of this problem,
especially from the United States and Great Britain,
for example Lancaster (1979), Lancaster/Nickell (1980),
Heckman/Borjas (1980), Nickell (1979), Flinn/Heckman
(1982), Lynch (1985), Moffitt (1985), Addison/Portugal
(1986a). In Germany the problems of unemployment dura¬
tion were only considered with aggregated data until
now with the exception of Büchtemann/Brasche (1985),
who based their analysis on individual data, but only
used cross tables and frequency distributions to de-
scribe the problems.
Hujer/Schneider have presented a very interesting
paper on unemployment duration in Germany by using
the instruments of event history analysis. Especially
four issues of their study are important: