Measuring early employment insecurity and its effects

In this paper we investigate the early employment insecurity of young people’s career by applying the “index of complexity”. This index measures the entropy and the number of transitions within a sequence (Gabadinho et al 2010). The entropy indicates the distribution of different positions within a sequence, hence its higher of lower degree of predictability; the number of transitions reveals the instability of the trajectory. This index is used to described the quality of young people’s trajectories in the UK using the UKHLS, also known as Understanding Society. The index is calculated for the trajectories covering the first four waves (2009-2013). The index is then used to unveil the relationship between a young person’s past trajectory and their labour market position in the fifth wave (2013-2014). We expect that young people with unstable trajectories are more likely to be out of the labour market or in temporary employment. This will confirm the scarring effect of early employment precariousness.