In many econometric applications it is unclear from the very beginning whether a parametric functional of a continuous regressor should be specified as a linear, as a higher order polynomial or as a piecewise linear. Nonparametric estimators can provide relevant information as they are a...

Unemployment information in individual level register data depends on institutional settings, administrative procedures and which registers are merged. In this paper we suggest different implementation strategies for common international and German legal unemployment definitions for the Sample...

In light of nonstationary search theory (van den Berg, 1990), this paper estimates the effects of benefit entitlement periods and the size of unemployment benefits on unemployment durations and post-unemployment earnings in West Germany. For the unemployment duration, we estimate censored...

In this paper we derive nonparametric bounds for the cumulative incidence curve within a competing risks model with partly identified interval data. As an advantage over earlier attempts our approach also gives valid results in case of dependent competing risks. We apply our framework to...

In this paper, we estimate the effect of different macro and micro variables on thedistribution of unemployment duration in West Germany using censored quantile regressions. We analyze unemployment periods of more than 91,000 observations from the years 1981 to 1997 drawn from the IAB employment...

The Box-Cox quantile regression model using the two stage method suggested by Chamberlain (1994) and Buchinsky (1995) provides a flexible and numerically attractive extension of linear quantile regression techniques. However, the objective function in stage two of the method may not exists. We...

In 1997, the German government enacted a reform of the unemployment insurance system which lead to a reduction of the maximum entitlement length for unemployment benefits. The paper analyses the effects of this reform on the risk of unemployment and on unemployment duration of the older...

We consider an extension of conventional univariate Kaplan-Meier type estimators for the hazard rate and the survivor function to multivariate censored data with a censored random regressor. It is an Akritas (1994) type estimator which adapts the nonparametric conditional hazard rate estimator...