Women earn less than men but are not less satisfied with life. This paper argues that norms on the appropriate pay for women compared to men explain these findings. We take citizens? approval of an equal rights amendment to the Swiss constitution as a proxy for the norm that ?women and men shall...

Women earn less than men but are not less satisfied with life. This paper argues that norms on the appropriate pay for women compared to men explain these findings. We take citizens’ approval of an equal rights amendment to the Swiss constitution as a proxy for the norm that “women and men...

Social norms are usually neglected in economics because they are to a large extent enforced through non-market interactions and difficult to isolate empirically. In this paper, we offer a direct measure of the social norm to live off one’s own income and we show that this norm has important...

The job finding rate declines with the duration of unemployment. While this is a well established fact, the reasons are still disputed. We use monthly search diaries from Swiss public employment offices to shed new light on this issue. Search diaries record all applications sent by job seekers,...

This paper studies the relevance of social interactions among the unemployed. Identification is based on a salient and selective extension of the potential duration of unemployment benefits. If social interactions are important, this policy change affects entitled individuals not only directly,...

In this paper, we suggest a novel approach to program evaluation that allows identification of the causal effect of a training program on the likelihood of being invited to a job interview under weak assumptions. The idea is to measure the program-effects by pre- and posttreatment data that are...

Firms are central to many theories of the labor market. However, the extent to which firms affect wages has only recently been explored using matched employer-employee data. This paper investigates (i) the importance of firms in explaining wage differences across individuals and industries, and...

The potential duration of benefits is generally viewed as an important determinant of unemployment duration. This paper evaluates a unique policy change that prolonged entitlement to regular unemployment benefits from 30 weeks to a maximum of 209 weeks for elderly individuals in certain regions...

This paper investigates the effectiveness of benefit sanctions in reducing unemployment duration. Data from the Swiss labor market allow making a distinction between the effect of a warning that a person is not complying with eligibility requirements and the effect of the actual enforcement of a...

This paper analyzes the impact of the Austrian Regional Extended Benefit Program (REBP) on the labor market outcomes for elderly workers in Austria. The REBP extended entitlement to regular unemployment benefits from 30 weeks to a maximum of 209 weeks for elderly individuals in certain regions....