In 1990 Colombia replaced its traditional system of severance payments with a new system of severance payments savings accounts (SPSAs). Although severance payments are often justified on the grounds that they provide insurance against earnings loss, they also increase costs for employers and...

The US labor market witnessed two apparently unrelated secular movements in the last 30 years: a decline in unemployment between the early 1980s and the early 2000s, and a decline in participation since the early 2000s. Using CPS micro data and a stock- ow accounting framework, we show that a...

More than a decade ago Oswald has formulated the thesis that homeownership increases unemployment. Empirical research on micro data has confirmed that unemployed homeowners are less inclined to move house in combination with accepting a new job elsewhere. However, in general for European...

This paper examines the empirical analysis of treatment effects on duration outcomes from data that contain instrumental variation. We focus on social experiments in which an intention to treat is randomized and compliance may be imperfect. We distinguish between cases where the treatment starts...

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in the <A HREF="http://personal.vu.nl/b.vander.klaauw/promotions.htm">'Journal of Population Economics'</A>, 2011, 24, 1513-1548. <P> We focus on the dynamic relation between wage increases, promotions and job changes. We relate our empirical analyses to the theoretical model of Gibbons and Waldman (1999). In the...</p></a>

We develop and empirically test a labor market model with Public Employment Agencies (PEA) in order to understand why not all vacancies use the costless services provided by the PEA. We show that both the search market and the PEA can be active in equilibrium. In such an equilibrium, workers...

We provide a set of comparable estimates for the rates of inflow to and outflow fromunemployment using publicly available data for fourteen OECD economies. We thendevise a method to decompose changes in unemployment into contributions accountedfor by changes in inflow and outflow rates for cases...