In a large class of hazard models with proportional unobserved heterogeneity, the distribution of the heterogeneity among survivors converges to a gamma distribution. This convergence is often rapid. We derive this result as a general result for exponential mixtures and explore its implications...

The vocational employment training program is the most ambitious and expensive training program in Sweden and a cornerstone of labor market policy. We analyze its causal effects on the individual transition rate from unemployment to employment by exploiting variation in the timing of treatment...

This paper improves upon the recently developed literature on exits from fixed exchange rate regimes in three ways: 1) It allows for two indicators for post-exit macroeconomic conditions, the change in the exchange rate and the change in the output gap; 2) it tests whether the distinction...

In housing markets with asymmetric information list prices may signal unobserved properties of the house or the seller. Asymmetric information is the starting point of many models for the housing market. In this paper, we estimate the causal effect of list-price reductions to test for the...

This Paper studies the evolution of job stability in West Germany. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we first show that the median elapsed tenure declined for men between 1984 and 1999. Second, estimating proportional Cox hazard models with competing risks and controls for stock...

We propose a new econometric estimation method for analysing the probability of leaving un-employment using uncompleted spells from repeated cross-section data, which can be especially useful when panel data are not available. The proposed method-of-moments-based estimator has two important...

This paper presents an analysis of the failure and completion rates of graduate students in economics at three universities in The Netherlands. We find that an indicator of the research productivity of the supervisor is an important determinant of the completion and dropout rates. However, this...

While the literature has established that there is substantial and highly selective return migration, the growing importance of repeat migration has been largely ignored. Using Markov chain analysis, this Paper provides a modelling framework for repeated moves of migrants between the host and...

In the early 1990s, the Dutch social partners agreed upon transforming the generous and actuarially unfair PAYG early retirement schemes into less generous and actuarially fair capital funded schemes. The starting dates of the transitional arrangements varied by industry sector. In this study,...

We evaluate the effect of active labour market programs on the duration of unemployment in a reward or punish system. In Switzerland, unemployment benefits are conditional upon program attendance after 7 months of unemployment duration. In the evaluation we allow for selectivity affecting the...