• Journal of Labour Economics
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.47-74
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• 2002

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.