Semiparametric estimation of employment duration models

There are a variety of economic areas, such as studies of employment duration and of the durability of capital goods, in which data on important variables typically are censored. The standard techniques for estimating a model from censored data require the distributions of unobservable random components of the model to be specified a priori up to a finite set of parameters, and misspecification of these distributions usually leads to inconsistent parameter estimates. However, economic theory rarely gives guidance about distributions and the standard estimation techniques do not provide convenient methods for identifying distributions from censored data. Recently, several distribution-free or semiparametric methods for estimating censored regression models have been developed. This paper presents the results of using two such methods to estimate a model of employment duration. The paper reports the operating characteristics of the semiparametric estimators and compares the semiparametric estimates with those obtained from a standard parametric model.