We show that recent attempts to reorganise and cut costs in the Norwegian health care and social services sectors have had the unintended side effects of raising the level of sickness absence and disability among the employees, and that these effects have persisted several years after completion...

Steadily increasing demand for personnel has led health care providers to seek more efficient uses of the healthcare workforce. One potential solution is to find ways of organizing work schedules that are more attractive and sustainable for workers. The primary objective of this article is to...

Large waves of refugees have arrived in Europe on a regular basis in recent decades. We know little about the impact of labour market policies intended to improve the labour market integration of refugees and their reunited family members. Using rich longitudinal data from Norway of the past 30...

We develop a forward-looking empirical concept of social exclusion based on the estimated transition probabilities from a random effects multinominal logit-model. Youths are considered socially excluded if they are currently outside school/work and have a low predicted probability of re-entering...

Labour market conditions at the time and place of potential entry into the labour market are shown to have a substantial and persistent impact on adult labour market performance. Birth cohorts that face particularly depressed labour markets when they graduate from primary- and/or secondary...

We use Norwegian register data from 1989 to 2002 to estimate the causal effects of programme participation on the transition rate from unemployment to employment,by means of a dependent risks hazard rate model. The separate roles of causality and unobserved heterogeneity are non-parametrically...

From a detailed study of the yearly wage bargaining rounds in Norway and Sweden, we construct time series of five complemetary coordination indices. Econometrics is used to evaluate the importance of the coordination indicators for our understanding of the changes in the rates of unemployment...

Based on a combined register database for Norwegian and Swedish unemployment spells, we use the ‘between-countries-variation’ in the unemployment insurance systems to identify causal effects. The elasticity of the job hazard rate with respect to the benefit replacement ratio is around -1.0...

The application of continuous time Weibull models on discrete unemployment duration data may produce bias in the estimated shape of the hazard rate. The bias can be substantial even for weekly duration data, and it is seriously aggravated if the Weibull model is erroneously mixed with a Gamma...

We present new Monte Carlo evidence regarding the feasibility of separating causality from selection within non-experimental interval-censored duration data, by means of the nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator (NPMLE). Key findings are: i) the NPMLE is extremely reliable, and it...