ABSTRACT
Life events of various sorts can have a critical impact on the labour market trajectories of individuals. This idea has received some recognition in the literature on transitional labour markets, particularly with regard to sickness and social risks, such as that of having an industrial accident (Wilthagen, 2002). Given the longitudinal nature of our data, we were able to construct ‘event histories’ of all our respondents during our research. We did so with two aims in mind. First, to see whether we could see a pattern of which events proved critical in both a positive and a negative sense, and, second, to see whether there were any gender differences in reactions to such events.
