Building on a large administrative micro data set for the time span 19752004 we look at lifetime unemployment for West German birth cohorts 1950 to 1954. Descriptive evidence shows a highly uneven distribution of unemployment in West Germany more than 60% of the individuals in our sample were...

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 1975-2004 to investigate individual lifetime unemployment (defined as the total length of all...

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...