Youth labour market integration in Spain: the connection between search time, job duration and skill-mismatch

In the last years, young workers in Spain have faced great difficulties to find and maintain a job. Using the ad hoc module of the Labour Force Survey (2nd quarter, 2000), this paper ana lyses the transition process from school to work for a sample of Spanish youngsters who left education, for the first time, after 1990. We allow the search period after completing education, the duration at first significant job, and the probability of being under-educated at that job, to be connected in a system of simultaneous equations which is estimated by maximum likelihood. The results suggest that employment duration is negatively correlated with the length of the search period. Furthermore, we observe unobserved factors affecting, at the same time, search duration, the probability of being under-educated and employment duratio