This paper aims at i) providing effect estimates of a wide range of covariates and traditional policy means to increase the smoking cessation rate, ii) offering evidence on alternative interventions for health authorities, and iii) examining and comparing three groups of smokers with varying...

When using data from individuals who are in the labour force to disentangle the empirical relevance of cohort, age and time effects for sickness absence, the inference may be biased, affected by sorting-out mechanisms. One reason is unobserved heterogeneity potentially affecting both health...

Political economy models predict that the rich oppose redistribution, and hence vote for conservative parties. Although this seems to fit the data well, I show that this is not true when we control for unobservable characteristics. Using Norwegian survey data, I study to what extent voting is...

We investigate treatment effects of active labour market programmes for Norwegian adults for the 1990 to 2000 period. Three types of active labour market programmes are evaluated within a competing risks hazard rate model. Non-parametric specifications on both duration dependence and unobserved...

We develop a new indicator of labour market tightness, based on the pure calendar time changes in individuals’ transition rates from unemployment to employment.Based on Norwegian register data from the 1989-2002 period, we show that this indicator,in contrast to the aggregate rate of...

We investigate how transitions from unemployment are affected by economic incentives and spell duration. Based on unique Norwegian register data that exhibit the rarity of random-assignment-like variation in economic incentives, the causal parameters are identified without reliance on...

This paper investigates the effects of five different vocational rehabilitation (VR) programs on the hazard rates into employment, disability and temporarily withdrawals from the labor market for persons who face severe problems in re-entering the labor market, mostly due to medical problems....

Based on a combined register database for Norwegian and Swedish unemployment spells, we use the ‘between-countries-variation’ in the unemployment insurance systems to identify causal effects. The elasticity of the job hazard rate with respect to the benefit replacement ratio is around -1.0...