This paper investigates the reading of fiction books by 15 year olds in 18 OECD countries. It appears that girls read fiction books more often than boys, whereas boys read comic books more often than girls. Parental education, family structure, and the number of books and televisions at home...

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,...

If a firm wants to reduce its workforce, it may dismiss some of its workers. Altematively, it may make workers eligible for disability benefits. Upon examination these workers formally satisfy the conditions for disability enrolment. Because these conditions allow for a rather liberal...

This paper studies how changes in the two key parameters of unemployment insurance-the benefit replacement rate (RR) and the potential benefit duration (PBD)-affect the duration of unemployment. To identify such an effect we exploit a policy change introduced in 1989 by the Austrian government,...

The Netherlands and the United Kingdom have experienced a major decline in unemployment rates since the early 1980s. Over the same period, there was also a strong decline in non-employment rates. Since in most other countries of the European Union such declines did not occur there is something...

Most labor economics textbooks pay little attention to actual labor markets, taking as reference a perfectly competitive market in which losing a job is not a big deal. The Economics of Imperfect Labor Markets is the only textbook to focus on imperfect labor markets and to provide a systematic...

In 1998 the Slovenian UI system was drastically reformed. The reform reduced the potential duration of unemployment benefits substantially and simultaneously improved employment services offered to, and monitoring of, the recipients. We find that the reduction in potential benefit duration had a...