Back to work: the effect of a long-term career interruption on subsequent wages in Switzerland

Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics

Table 6 Future wage effects of a long-term non-employment spell for men and women. Dependent variable: log real hourly wage, j waves after the interruption

Waves after interruption (= j):	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8
Men	− 0.105^a (0.019)	− 0.118^a (0.019)	− 0.095^a (0.020)	− 0.102^a (0.019)	− 0.095^a (0.017)	−0.042^b (0.019)	−0.023 (0.019)	0.004 (0.022)
Observations with long-term career interruption indicated j waves ago	113	99	88	89	110	74	70	56
Total observations	15,936	13,709	11,768	10,229	9152	7731	6552	5513
Women	− 0.058^a (0.018)	− 0.065^a (0.018)	− 0.081^a (0.017)	− 0.032^c (0.017)	0.017 (0.016)	0.012 (0.017)	0.011(0.019)	− 0.000 (0.020)
Observations with long-term career interruption indicated j waves ago	225	216	199	188	214	172	160	119
Total observations	16,012	13,652	11,608	9954	8741	7266	6034	4963

Source: Swiss Household Panel (SHP), own calculations
The separate samples for men and women in column j are equally restricted to individuals who reported to be employed in j interview waves since the interruption ended, where j equals 1, 2, …, 8, respectively. As we still find a significant negative effect for men after 6 interview waves, we extended our analysis by two more periods to show that the wage recovers later in the future. Full set of control variables is: age, age², children, sector, firm size, type of job, dummies for married, part-time, fixed-term contract, lag j final period of education, lag j further education and wave. Standard errors are in parentheses. ^a significant at the 1% level, ^b significant at the 5% level, ^c significant at the 10% level