This paper exploits a substantial reform of the Dutch UI law to study the effect of the entitlement period on job finding and subsequent labor market outcomes. Using detailed administrative data covering the full population we find that reducing the entitlement period increases the job finding...

We combine two techniques to consistently estimate the effect of active labour market programmes and, in particular, active labour market policy regimes. Our aim is to explicitly estimate the threat effect of active labour market programmes. Based on Danish data (1998- 2002) from administrative...

This paper uses a social experiment in labour market policy – providing early and intensive monitoring and programme participation in unemployment spells – to assess the nature of labour market policy effectiveness. The experiment was conducted in two counties in Denmark during the winter of...

In this article we propose and implement an instrumental variable estimation procedure to obtain treatment effects on duration outcomes. The method can handle the typical complications that arise with duration data of time-varying treatment and censoring. The treatment effect we define is in...

This study examines individuals’ unemployment experiences from the age of 18 up to the age of 35 using a large panel of administrative records on unemployment related benefit claims of men in the United Kingdom over the past two decades. The main focus is on the extent to which individuals’...

Using a large panel of administrative records this study confirms the predictions of the ranking model of Blanchard and Diamond (1994) that an individual’s probability of leaving unemployment decreases with unemployment duration and increases with economic growth. However, the ranking model of...

While job search theory predicts that active labour market policies (ALMPs) can affect post-unemployment outcomes, empirical evaluations investigating transition rates have mostly focused on the impact of ALMPs on exit rates from the current unemployment spell. We use a social experiment, which...

When treatments may occur at different points in time, most evaluation methods assume – implicitly or explicitly – that all the information used by subjects about the occurrence of a future treatment is available to the researcher. This is often called the “no anticipation” assumption....

Individual labour market transitions from unemployment into temporary work are often succeeded by a transition from temporary into regular work. We investigate whether temporary work increases the transition rate to regular work. In that case, temporary work may enhance labour market efficiency....

In the mid-1980s, many European countries introduced fixed-term contracts. Since then their labor markets have become more dynamic. This paper studies the possible implications of such reforms for the duration distribution of unemployment. I estimate a parametric duration model using...