The search for and dating of a possible european business cycle, has been inconclusive. At this stage, there is no consensus on the existence of such a cycle, or of its periodicity and amplitude, or of the relationship of individual member countries to that cycle. Yet cyclical convergence is the...

The dynamics of women’s labour supply are examined at a crucial stage of the life-cycle. This paper uses the longitudinal employment history records for 3,893 33-year-old mothers in the 5th sweep of the 1958 National Child Development Study cohort. Models of binary recurrent events are...

Total fertility in Austria has declined slowly but persistently from about 1.7 in the late 1970s to around 1.4 in the mid-90s, a reduction of less than twenty percent. As we show in this paper, a much stronger reduction (over fifty percent) occured over the same period in the standardized rate...

Why are socially beneficial reforms not implemented? One simple answer to this question (which has received little attention in the literature) is that this may be caused by generalised uncertainty about the effectiveness of reforms. If agents are unsure about whether a proposed reform will...

We characterize asset return linkages during periods of stress by an extremal dependence measure. Contrary to correlation analysis, this non-parametric measure is not predisposed towards the normal distribution and can account for non-linear relationships. Our estimates for the G-5 countries...

This Paper estimates causal effects of two Polish active labour market policies – Training and Intervention Works – on employment probabilities. Utilizing data from the 18th wave of the Polish Labor Force Survey we discuss three stages of an appropriately designed exact matching procedure....

In this note we demonstrate that in affine models for bilateral exchange rates, the nature of return interdependence during crises depends on the tail properties of the fundamentals’ distribution. We denote crisis linkages as either strong or weak, in the sense that the dependence remains or...

In the second half of the 1990s Switzerland introduced an ambitious active labour market policy (ALMP) encompassing a variety of programmes. We evaluate the effects of these programmes on individual employment probability using unusually informative data originating from administrative records....

Since interventions by the public sector generally commit substantial societal resources, the evaluation of effects and costs of policy interventions is imperative. This Paper outlines why programme evaluation should follow well respected scientific standards and why it should be performed by...

We analyse the evolution of the business cycle in the accession countries, after a careful examination of the seasonal properties of the available series and the required modification of the cycle dating procedures. We then focus on the degree of cyclical concordance within the group of...