Savings and labour market transitions

A model is developed that allows for a layoff rate and a job arrival rate in the intertemporal choice of consumption and labor market state. The identification of such a model is established without recourse to dynamic programming solutions and the minimum data requirements for estimation are derived. Unobserved heterogeneity is included in the model specification but state dependence is only allowed through the layoff and arrival rates which are restricted to be functions of observable weakly exogenous variables.