Unemployment insurance agencies may combat moral hazard by punishing refusals to apply to assigned vacancies. However, the possibility to report sick creates an additional moral hazard, since during sickness spells, minimum requirements on search behavior do not apply. This reduces the ex ante...

Standard search models are unreliable for structural inference of the underlying sources of wage inequality because they are inconsistent with observed residual wage dispersion. We address this issue by modeling skill development and duration dependence in unemployment benefits in a random on...

This paper tests the signalling hypothesis using detailed flow-based employer-employee data from Denmark. The primary focus is to explore how the conditions in the pre-displacement firm affect the duration of unemployment. The empirical analysis is conducted within a competing risk framework,...

In this article we propose and implement an instrumental variable estimation procedure to obtain treatment effects on duration outcomes. The method can handle the typical complications that arise with duration data of time-varying treatment and censoring. The treatment effect we define is in...

This paper evaluates the effects of job creation schemes on the participating individuals in Germany. Since previous empirical studies of these measures have been based on relatively small datasets and focussed on East Germany, this is the first study which allows to draw policy-relevant...

This paper estimates the causal effect of long-term unemployment on wages. Job search theory implies that if Unemployment Insurance (UI) extensions do not affect wages conditional on the month of unemployment exit, then reservation wages do not bind on average. Then, UI extensions affect mean...

Standard job search theory assumes that unemployed individuals have perfect information about the effect of their search effort on the job offer arrival rate. In this paper, we present an alternative model which assumes instead that each individual has a subjective belief about the impact of his...

A thorny problem in identifying the determinants of reservation wages and particularly the role of continued joblessness in their evolution is the simultaneity issue. We deploy a natural control function approach to the problem that involves conditioning elapsed duration on completed...

We estimate the effect of a shortening of unemployment benefit entitlements on unemployment duration. Previous studies on the same or related problems have not taken into account that the competing risks duration model is not identified and we shed first light on the question whether the non...