Jobless households: longitudinal analysis of the persistence and determinants of joblessness using HILDA data for 2001–03

This report compares cross-sectional and longitudinal joblessness rates and finds that, for some types of household - especially lone parent and lone person households - joblessness is persistent. However, for other types of household (especially couple households), joblessness is usually a transient or short term experience.The HILDA panel survey enables policy makers to gain an improved understanding of joblessness by making it possible to analyse how many households are persistently or multiyear jobless. Previous research was almost entirely based on cross-sectional snapshots of how many household were jobless at one point in time. Annual joblessness rates do not change much, so it seems an ‘obvious’ conclusion that many households remained persistently jobless. This report compares cross-sectional and longitudinal joblessness rates and finds that, for some types of household - especially lone parent and lone person households - joblessness is indeed persistent. However, for other types of household (especially couple households), joblessness is usually a transient or short term experience