Using data from the Portuguese quarterly employment surveys, 1992-96, the present chapter examines the effect of unemployment insurance (UI) on escape rates from unemployment. The first concern is to identify the manner in which UI influences the time profile of these broad transitions. To this...

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...

Conventional analyses of the effect of unemployment insurance (UI) on unemployment duration have neglected the issue of sample construction. The authors show that such studies, by failing to account for job finding among those eligible for UI within intervals corresponding to the waiting time...

This paper examines how advance notice of layoff affects the incidence and duration of unemployment following displacement. The authors use the Displaced Worker Survey for 1988, which, unlike earlier surveys in the series, contains information on written notice. The results are mixed. Longer...

In this paper we investigate the process of job search, using a unique, large-scale data set for Portugal that allows us to assess the effect of job search methods on escape rates from unemployment and, in a new departure, the impact of job-finding methods used by the unemployed on earnings. In...

In Portugal duration of benefits is exclusively age determined while replacement rates are essentially uniform. We exploit differences in potential maximum duration of benefits for nearly matched pairs of individuals to determine the effects of benefit duration on job finding.

This paper estimates a wage equation that includes worker- and firm fixed effects simultaneously, using a longitudinal matched employer-employee dataset covering virtually all Portuguese employees over a little more than two-decades. The exercise is performed under optimal conditions by using...