Low-paid employment is a key issue for labour market policy. The essays in this book, focusing on European countries, provide new empirical evidence regarding the impact of minimum wages on employment, earnings mobility among low-paid workers, job satisfaction across the earnings distribution,...

This paper evaluates the German health care reform of 1997, using the individual number of doctor visits as outcome measure and data from the German Socio-Economic Panel for the years 1995-1999. A number of modified count data models allow us to estimate the effect of the reform in different...

This paper analyses the effects of distance as a common determinant of exports and FDI in a three-factor New Trade Theory model, assuming that distance affects both pure trade costs and plant set-up costs. Exports and FDI are not necessarily substitutes with respect to distance, since the...

This paper develops a dynamic programming model of the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) application timing decision. We estimate the time to application from the point at which a health condition first begins to affect the kind or amount of work that a currently employed person can...

We analyse the joint distribution of the durations until retirement of Danish husbands and wives. We estimate a multivariate mixed proportional hazards model that allows for interdependence in the times to retirement of spouses. We find evidence of strong complementarities in leisure times....

Convergence in the gross domestic product series of five European countries is empirically identified using multivariate time series models that are based on unobserved components with dynamic converging properties. We define convergence in terms of a decrease in dispersion over time and model...