Duration to First Job of Korean Young Graduates: Before and After the Economic Crisis

청년층의 첫 일자리 진입 : 경제위기 전후의 비교

Since the Economic Crisis at the end of 1997, unemployment rate soared up to the record-high 8.6% (February 1999) and, for youth aged 15~29, it was 14.6% (27.8% for aged 15~19). In spite of economic recovery after the crisis, new participants in labor market at the school-to-work transition have faced with difficulties in finding their first jobs and, even further, the ratio of youth at out-of the labor force but not in school has remained at a higher level. It is important to calibrate the negative effects of nonemployment in the short-run as well as in the long-run, but there has been few study on the school-to-work transition in Korea. This study focus on the nonemployment duration to first job after formal education and comparison of its pattern before and after the crisis. A proportional hazard model, considering job prenaration before graduation (21.4% of the sample), with the semi-parametric baseline hazard is applied to the sample from the Korean Labor and Income Panel Survey(1998~2000) and its Youth Supplemental survey(2000). Interview of the Survey is conducted, by the Korea Labor Institute, to the same 5,000 household and 13,738 individual sample, guaranteeing nationwide representativeness. The Supplemental Survey consists of 3,302 young individuals aged 15 to 29 at the time of survey and 1,615 of them who are not in school and provide appropriate information is used for the analysis. The empirical results show that there exists negative duration dependence at the first three or for months at the transition period and no duration dependence since a turning point of the baseline hazard rate and that unemployment rate reflecting labor demand conditions has a positive effect on exiting the nonemployment state, which is inconsistent with a theoretical conclusion. Estimation with samples separated by the date of graduation before and after the crisis shows that the effect of unemployment rate on the hazard was negative for the pre-crisis sample but positive for the post-crisis sample.

경제위기 직후 실업률의 급상승과 함께 경기변동에 민감한 청년층의 실업률은 15~20%까지 상승하였다. 경기회복에도 불구하고 신규학졸자의 첫 일자리 취업에는 상당한 애로가 존재하고 청년층의 유휴화율은 여전히 심각한 수준이다. 청년층 유휴화의 부정적 효과에도 불구하고 청년층의 학교교육-노동시장 이행과정에 관한 연구는 일천하다. 본 연구는 "한국노동패널" 3차년도(2000년)에 실시한 "청년층 부가조사" 자료를 이용하여 15~29세 청년층이 최종 학교를 마치고 첫 일자리를 취득하는 데 소요되는 미취업 경과기간을 분석한다. 미취업상태가 경과할수록 탈출확률이 낮아지는 부(-)의 경과 기간 의존성이 나타나며, 예상과는 달리, 여성의 탈출확률이 남성보다 높게 나타난다. 학력수준의 탈출확률에 대한 효과는 경제위기 이전에는 유의하지 않게 나타나나 경제위기 이후에는 뚜렷한 것으로 나타난다. 경제위기 이전 졸업자 표본은 높은 실업률이 탈출확률을 낮추는 반면 경제위기 이후 졸업자 표본은 정반대의 결과를 보여준다.