Using an international survey that directly assesses the cognitive skills of the adult population, I study the relation between skills and unemployment flows across 37 countries. Depending on the specifically assessed domain, I document that skills have an unconditional correlation with the...

Governments are showing an increasing interest in quantitative models that give insights into the determinants of unemployment duration. Yet, these models oftentimes do not explicitly take into account that unemployment prospects are influenced by personality characteristics that are not being...