In this paper, we study the initial-conditions problem, a complication associated with left-censored or interrupted spells in the econometric analysis of labor market transitions. In the presence of unobserved individual-specific heterogeneity, no consistent estimators have been previously...

In the econometric analysis of labor market transitions, the data generating process is often specified as a continuous-time semi-Markovian process with a finite state space. With typically short panel data, analysts have long been concerned with the initial conditions problem--- a complication...