88. The results for unemployment insurance recipiency are almost identical, both qualitatively and quantitatively, to the ones obtained with the Unemployment Registry data, the only exception being that the coefficient for past recipiency is now smaller than one and insignificant (Table XIII). This probably responds to the fact that spells are much shorter in this sample, and therefore there are fewer individuals with a long enough history to reflect such changes (i.e. the standard errors associated with this coefficient are large).

89. In contrast, the demographic results differ somewhat from the ones obtained with the Unemployment Registry. Gender and marital status are not significant determinants of unemployment duration in this sample, while education still appears to be negatively correlated with it. The effect of previous experience is also reversed, which is most likely due to the fact that 'lack of experience' was an imputed variable in the Unemployment Registry but a recorded, and thus more accurate variable here.<sup>22</sup> Checking for robustness, however, is not the only advantage associated with using the Labor Force Survey. This data also provides information on social assistance/support payments and on household-level variables, such as the number of young children in the family, which may have important effects on unemployment duration and are not included in the Unemployment Registry.

90. Interestingly, social assistance/support seems to have the same effects as unemployment insurance, only more pronounced: social assistance/support recipients spend almost 50 percent more time unemployed than non-recipients. This appears to be entirely due entirely to the fact that social assistance/support duration is unlimited, since the marginal effect associated with an extra month of benefits is almost equal for both programs. With respect to household-level variables, only the individual's position in the family seems to have explanatory power, with household heads and their spouses spending more time unemployed than other members of the household (although this result is only significant for the latter).

91. In sum, in this section we have learnt that (i) both unemployment insurance and social assistance/support recipiency increase unemployment duration, and that (ii) the behavior of those individuals who are entitled to benefits varies over time, depending on whether they are actually receiving the payments or they did so in the past. In particular, exit rates for this group increase substantially after their benefits are over. This is an issue that deserves further attention, but before we look into it in more detail we would like to illustrate, through graphical analysis, the magnitude of the effects we have been discussing. For this purpose, we have simulated distributions of predicted unemployment spells under different hypothetical scenarios, using the models described above and the Unemployment Registry. Such distributions are then compared in ways that help us understand the role played by the different features of the unemployment insurance system (i.e. eligibility and coverage, duration of benefits, replacement ratio).

> 22 When using the UR, the variable 'No previous employment experience' is constructed based only on employment data for 1990-2000, while the LFS questionnaire directly asks people whether they have worked before.

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