We test whether households that face prospective home equity losses during a house price downturn use divorce to shed debt. We study the Dutch context, where qualifying homeowners can buy into a mortgage guarantee scheme that insures the lender against borrower default and transfers the risk to...

This paper makes use of a natural experiment to examine effects of potential capital losses and general attractiveness of pension schemes on employees' propensity to change jobs. On January 1st 2004, the two largest pension funds in the Netherlands, for civil servants and for the health care...

Most empirical studies on the impact of labour income taxation on the labour supply behaviour of households use a unitary modelling approach. In this paper we empirically analyze income taxation and the choice of working hours by combining the collective approach for household behaviour and the...

We empirically analyze the language proficiency of migrants in the Netherlands. Traditionally, the emphasis in studying language proficiency and economic outcomes has been on the relation between earnings and indicators for language proficiency, motivated by the human capital theory. Here we...

This paper analyzes the time allocation of Italian spouses to paid work, childcare and household work. The literature suggests that Italian husbands contribute the least to unpaid household work, relative to other European countries, while Italian women have the lowest market employment rates....

This paper focuses on the time allocation of spouses and the impact of economic variables. We present a stylized model of the time allocation of spouses to illustrate the expected impact of wages and non-labour income. The empirical model simultaneously specifies three time-use choices - paid...

Theoretical models predict a positive impact of the level of individual wealth on the job exit probability. Empirically this prediction is most likely to be relevant for elderly workers who have accumulated wealth throughout their working life and have a short residual working life. In the...

This paper identifies and estimates the impact of early retirement on the probability to die within five years, using administrative micro panel data covering the entire population of the Netherlands. Among the older workers we focus on, a group of civil servants became eligible for retirement...

In this paper, we use a recent policy change in the Netherlands to study how changes in search requirements for the older unemployed affect their transition rates to employment, early retirement and sickness/disability benefits. The reform, becoming effective on January 1st 2004, required the...

An empirical analysis of labor market transitions for spouses in couples is implemented. Object of study are transitions between the states of nonparticipation, unemployed search, and employment. Motivated by a model of household search, the emphasis is on spousal variables and interactions....