Abstract
Does early‐career unemployment cause future unemployment? The authors approach this question using German administrative matched employer–employee data that track almost 700,000 individuals over 24 years. Instrumenting early‐career unemployment with firm‐specific labour demand shocks, they find significant and long‐lasting “scarring effects”. In the mean, each additional day of unemployment during the first eight years on the labour market increases unemployment in the following 16 years by half a day. However, quantile regressions show that the scarring effects are much stronger for individuals who already suffer from lengthy and repeated spells of unemployment.