Does after-school care provision promote mothers’ employment and balance the allocation of paid work among parents of schoolchildren? We address this question by exploiting variation in cantonal (state) regulations of after-school care provision in Switzerland. To establish exogeneity of...

This paper develops a criterion of opportunity equalization, that is consistent with theoretical views of equality of opportunity. Our analysis rests on the characterization of inequality of opportunity as a situation where some groups in society enjoy an illegitimate advantage. In this context,...

This document provides recent evidence about the persistency of wage gaps between formal and informal workers in Colombia. The methodology is based on a non-parametric procedure proposed by Nopo (2008a) that allows us to compare labor incomes using matching on variables over a Nationwide...

This paper assesses the matching efficiency of the Portuguese public employment service, applying Data Envelopment Analysis combined with principal component analysis to Portuguese administrative data and comparing the situations in June 1998 and June 2001. We find evidence that the Portuguese...

An increasing amount of empirical evidence suggests that patients with higher socioeconomic status wait less within publicly-funded hospitals to receive non-emergency (elective) surgery. Using data from Australia, we investigate the extent to which such gradient can be explained by sample...

Recently, there has been considerable work on stochastic time-varying coefficient models as vehicles for modelling structural change in the macroeconomy with a focus on the estimation of the unobserved paths of random coefficient processes. The dominant estimation methods, in this context, are...

Operational risk data, when available, are usually scarce, heavy-tailed and possibly dependent. In this work, we introduce a model that captures such real-world characteristics and explicitly deals with heterogeneous pairwise and tail dependence of losses. By considering flexible families of...

The decomposition of gender or ethnic wage gaps into explained and unexplained components (often with the aim to assess labor market discrimination) has been a major research agenda in empirical labor economics. This paper demonstrates that conventional decompositions, no matter whether linear...

In this paper examine the impact of the current financial crisis on the performance of banks across 19 countries from Central and Eastern European for the period 2004 – 2010. The period chosen is relevant in the context of the entrance of new ten EU members at the beginning of the year 2004...

The paper examines the redistributive effect achieved by the tax-benefit system in Mexico in 2012 using personal income tax, indirect taxes, social security contributions and social benefits. Our goal is to analyze progressivity of the fiscal system and go further to demonstrate how the...