This dissertation addresses different issues from the field of empirical labor economics and comprises three stand-alone research papers. The thesis is organized as follows: the first two chapters deal with the inclusion of personality traits in labor economic research. In recent years, it has...

Why do some countries institutionalize a social program compensating the unemployed while others do not? My main argument is that the choice to have an unemployment insurance program is a function of 1) the distribution of unemployment risks within a country and 2) political processes through...

This paper studies the effect of increased immigration in Austria on the unemployment risk of young natives. Austria experienced a dramatic rise in the share of alien workers as a result of the breakdown of the former communist regimes (especially from former Yugoslavia). We concentrate on...

After a decade of structural reforms, unemployment rates have tripled in Argentina. This paper is concerned with the measurement of unemployment risk and its distribution. We show the importance of considering re-incidence in the measurement of unemployment risk and develop a methodolgy to do...

This paper contributes to the literature on the effects of uncertainty on household saving - a long-standing and extensively explored topic yet leaving a number of issues inconclusive. It concentrates on the labor income uncertainty by addressing saving against unemployment risk in terms of...

In the Covid-19 crisis, most OECD countries have used short-time work (subsidized working time reductions) to preserve employment relationships. This paper studies whether short-time work can save jobs through stabilizing aggregate demand in recessions. First, we show that the consumption risk...