This paper studies how cognitive and social skills in childhood are related to the duration of unemployment in adolescence and early adulthood. I estimate a flexible proportional hazard rate model for the probability of making a transition from unemployment to employment during an individual’s...

I investigate the effect of human capital on entrepreneurship using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth - 1979. I find that individuals with higher measured intelligence and self-confidence are more likely to be entrepreneurs. Furthermore I present evidence suggesting that intelligence and...

Aiming to explore how the survival of trade flows has evolved over time, we analyze a rich data set of detailed imports to individual EU15 countries from 140 non-EU exporters, covering the period 1962–2006. We find that short duration is a persistent characteristic of trade throughout the...

The objective of this paper is twofold. First, against the background of an existing empirical literature on the duration of trade which has found that international trade is often of strikingly short duration, we aim to establish whether or not EU imports from the rest of the world also are...

The recent literature on the duration of trade has predominantly analyzed the determinants of trade flow durations using Cox proportional hazards models. The purpose of this paper is to show why it is inappropriate to analyze the duration of trade with continuous-time models such as the Cox...

No abstract.

We estimate the effect of college education on business survival using the NLSY79. The endogeneity of both education and business ownership is accounted for by a competing risks duration model augmented with a college selection equation. Contrary to the previous literature, we fi…nd no effect...

Though more than 100 countries have adopted gender quotas, the impacts of these reforms on women’s political leadership remain largely unknown. We exploit a quasi-experiment – a zipper quota imposed by the Swedish Social Democratic national party on municipal party groups – to examine...

Using linked employer-employee data from Sweden, a difference-in-difference approach, and 201 private equity buyouts undertaken between 1998 and 2004, we show that unemployment risk declines and labor income increases for employees in the wake of a private equity buyout. Unemployment risk...

Recent theoretical analysis suggests that a reduction in the cost of exporting increases the degree of assortative matching between workers and firms in export-oriented industries. Changes that reduce the cost of imports have an ambiguous impact on matching. We combine detailed Swedish matched...