The system of unemployment benefits and subsistence benefits in Slovakia has potentially large disincentive effects with respect to the outflow from unemployment to a job. Especially low educated unemployed and unemployed with young children are often faced with replacement ratios which are...

Youth unemployment is an issue of primary concern in Western European countries. In this paper we analyze dynamics in unemployment for youths, adults (prime-aged individuals), and elderly. We use quarterly French unemployment data, stratified by gender, age group, and duration, over the period...

In the Netherlands, students who want to become a medical specialist have to enrol in a training program which is in limited supply. During the search for a position as trainee (or "junior medical specialist"), they may accept a temporary job as a medical assistant. We use a micro data set to...

Recent evaluations of active lab or market policies are not very optimistic about their effectiveness to bring unemployed back to work. An important reason is that unemployed get locked-in, that is they reduce their effort to find a regular job. This paper uses an administrative dataset from the...

This paper uses information about prime age individuals living in Amsterdam to study the dynamics in the use of tobacco, cannabis, and cocaine. The analysis examines transitions from non-use to use, as well as transitions from use to non-use. Particular attention is given to the effect of the...

This chapter analyses the tensions between books and book markets as expressions of culture and books as products in profit-making businesses and includes insights from the theory of industrial organisation. Governments intervene in the market for books through laws concerning prices of books,...

This article analyses the design of optimal unemployment insurance in a search equilibrium framework where search effort among the unemployed is not perfectly observable. We examine to what extent the optimal policy involves monitoring of search effort and benefit sanctions if observed search is...

In the past decades unemployment in the Netherlands has gone down substantially. The main suspects responsible for this decline are the growth of part-time labor, the reform of the benefit system and wage moderation. Nevertheless, in 2002 the unemployment rate in the Netherlands has increased...

This paper studies how changes in the two key parameters of unemployment insurance – the benefit replacement rate (RR) and the potential duration of benefits (PBD) – affect the duration of unemployment. In 1989, the Austrian government made unemployment insurance more generous by changing,...