The empirical literature on unemployment almost exclusively focuses on the duration of distinct unemployment spells. In contrast we use a large German administrative micro data set for the time span 19752004 to investigate individual lifetime unemployment (defined as the total length of all...

Does early-career unemployment cause future unemployment? We answer this question with German administrative matched employer-employee data that track more than 800,000 individuals over 24 years. Using a censored quantile instrumental variable estimator and instrumenting early-career...