Job spells in an emerging market: Evidence from apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa

Few studies exist on job duration in developing labour markets?an important omission both in our understanding of such markets and for the job duration literature, which is mainly based on developed-country case studies, which differ in structural ways. The main reason for this is likely data constraints in developing countries, since job duration analysis has intensive data requirements. Recently, two data sets meeting these requirements became publicly available in South Africa, covering the apartheid and post-apartheid eras.