The Impact of Youth Unemployment on Adult Unemployment in the NCDS

Using the National Child Development Survey, this paper looks at cumulated experience of unemployment, highlighting how unemployment experience is concentrated on a minority of the workforce over extended periods. Low educational attainment, ability not captured by education, financial deprivation and behavioural problems in childhood raise a person’s susceptibility to unemployment, there is strong evidence of structural dependence induced by early unemployment experience for men but only minor persistence for women. Attacking low educational achievement, and preventing the build‐up of substantial periods in unemployment as youths, may reduce the extent to which a minority of men spend a large part of their working lives unemployed.