This paper sheds new light on the effects of the minimum wage on employment from a two-sided theoretical perspective, in which firms’ job offer and workers’ job acceptance decisions are disentangled. Minimum wages reduce job offer incentives and increase job acceptance incentives. We show...

Unemployment is at a low and stable level in Denmark. This achievement is often attributed to the so-called flexicurity model combining flexible hiring and firing rules for employers with income security for employees. Whatever virtues this model may have, a low and stable unemployment rate is...

The Danish labour market has undergone a remarkable change during the 1990s with a reduction of the unemployment rate from about 12 per cent in 1993 to less than 6 per cent at the turn of the century. This reflects both a turn in the business cycle but also structural changes related to shifts...

This paper uses regional variation in labor markets, the industry structure and the educational system to explain the training decisions of firms. Using a representative firm-level data set, the results show that firms are less likely to offer training if the number of competing firms situated...

While coping with nonsphericality of the disturbances, standard GMM suffers from a blind spot for exploiting the most effective instruments when these are obtained directly from unconditional rather than conditional moment assumptions. For instance, standard GMM counteracts that exogenous...

Measurement error causes a downward bias when estimating a panel data linear regression model. The panel data context offers various opportunities to derive moment conditions that result in consistent GMM estimators. We consider three sources of moment conditions: (i) restrictions on the...

The performance in finite samples is examined of inference obtained by variants of the Arellano-Bond and the Blundell-Bond GMM estimation techniques for single dynamic panel data models with possibly endogenous regressors and cross-sectional heteroskedasticity. By simulation the effects are...

Research has shown that birthweight has a lasting impact on later-life outcomes such as educational attainment and earnings. This paper examines the role of health at birth in determining academic achievement in childhood, which may provide the link between birthweight and adult outcomes. Using...

Rain affects electoral turnout both through a direct effect on the cost of voting and by changing the opportunity cost. In a panel of Norwegian municipalities I find that rain on Election Day increases turnout. As turnout affects electoral outcomes, rain provides an exogeneous source of...

This paper studies the association between the unemployment experience of fathers and their sons. Based on German survey data that cover the last decades we find significant positive correlations. Using instrumental variables estimation and the Gottschalk (1996) method we investigate to what...