Misperceptions of unemployment and individual labor market outcomes

Table 1 Descriptive statistics, analysis sample

Variable	Mean or share	St. dev.
(Log) earnings, lower bound of decile (Euro)	7.353	0.659
(Log) earnings, upper bound of decile (Euro)	7.456	0.648
Misperception unemployment, p.p. (abs value)	12.81	13.03
If misperception positive	16.03	13.08
If misperception negative	3.084	2.007
Share of workers
With misperception positive	0.781
With misperception negative	0.087
(Log) regional unemployment rate	1.803	0.378
Female	0.405
Age	40.12	11.14
Education (less than upper secondary omitted)
Upper secondary	0.425
Tertiary	0.400
Ability1	0.956
Ability2	0.774
Firm size (1–99 omitted)
100–500	0.230
500+	0.184
Industry (other services omitted)
Primary sector	0.013
Manufacturing	0.203
Construction	0.073
Finance	0.045
Occupation (unskilled omitted)
Clerks, serv., sales	0.240
Skilled, machine opers	0.204
Managers, profls., technicians	0.459
Part-timer	0.102
Supervisor	0.365
Open end contract	0.828
Trade union member	0.264
Children below 16 (yes/no)	0.257
Partner (yes/no)	0.167
Number obs. ^a	2310

Source: Computations are based on ESS (2008). Notes: The misperception index is computed according to Eq. 1 (i.e., the difference between the perceived and the actual unemployment rate in the country); to compute the share of workers with non-zero (i.e., positive or negative) misperception, we rounded the gap to the closest integer. ability1 equals one if the respondent understood the questions very often or often and zero otherwise; ability2 equals one if the respondent never or almost never required clarifications on the questions and zero otherwise. The computations use ESS post-stratification weights combined with population size weights
^a88 observations on earnings are left-censored and 89 are right-censored; data is missing for 11, 7, and 37 observations, on ability1, ability2, and part-timer, respectively. For the regional unemployment rate, the number of observations is 1700, as data are not available for four countries (see text)