st: repeated events employment - unemployment

[marcel marcel <marcel_stata@hotmail.com>]

Dear Statalisters,

I have longitudinal data on employment - unemployment histories. By construction, the data set consists of individuals that have been unemployed at least once during the period for which data are available.
Some individuals experience only one episode of unemployment, others alternate between employment and unemployment (short spells of unemployment followed by short spells of employment. The hypothesis is that some characteristics of individuals influence the probability of the number of times these individuals alternate between these two states. My question is what type of analysis to use to test this hypothesis. 

I can think of duration models, poisson models or markov models, but I'am not sure which approach is best suited for this problem. 


Best regards,

Marcel


 		 	   		  
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