Tertiary education has been expanding hugely over the last decades, so that tertiary dropout students will constitute a growing distinctive group in future labour markets. University dropout is regularly discussed as a ‘negative’ indicator. However, research on actual career trajectory of...

Using longitudinal data for Canada, we analyze the incidence and wage returns to employer supported course enrollment for men and women. Availability of confidential data, along with a relatively rich set of observable covariates, lead us to the estimation of difference-in-differences matching...

There is a substantial correlation between household debt and bodyweight. Theory suggests that a causal relationship between debt and bodyweight could run in either direction or both could be caused by unobserved common factors. We use OLS and Propensity Score Matching to ascertain if household...

Our paper investigates the relative effects of wage subsidies and further vocational training on the subsequent employment prospects of previously unemployed program participants. First, we outline a theoretical approach based on a firm's hiring decision. For the relative effectiveness of both...

Our paper estimates the average effect of wage subsidies – paid to employers for a limited period of time – on the labour market prospects of needy job-seekers without access to insurance-paid 'unemployment benefit I'. The results show that wage subsidies had large and significant favourable...

Welfare reform in Australia centres on the concept of both economic and social participation. The policy concern is that people who fail to participate in economic and social life may become entrenched in disadvantage. In 2000 - 2001, a randomized trial was conducted by the Department of Family...

Many Western economies have reformed their welfare systems with the aim of activating welfare recipients by increasing welfare-to-work programmes and job search enforcement. We evaluate the three most important German welfare-to-work programmes implemented after a major reform in January 2005...

Using American panel data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88) this paper investigates the effect of working during grade 12 on attainment. We exploit the longitudinal nature of the NELS by employing, for the first time in the related literature, a semiparametric...

We evaluate the presence of effects from joining one of four active labour market programs in Romania in the late 1990s compared to the no-program state. Using rich survey data and propensity score matching, we find that three programs (training and retraining, small business assistance, and...

More than 70% of global e-mail traffic consists of unsolicited and commercial direct marketing, also known as spam. Dealing with spam incurs high costs for organizations, prompting efforts to try to reduce spam-related costs by installing spam filters. Using modern econometric methods to reduce...