In the early 1990s, the Dutch social partners agreed upon transforming the generous and actuarially unfair PAYG early retirement schemes into less generous and actuarially fair capital funded schemes. The starting dates of the transitional arrangements varied by industry sector. In this study,...

We study a mixed hitting-time (MHT) model that specifies durations as the first time a Lévy process— a continuous-time process with stationary and independent increments— crosses a heterogeneous threshold. Such models are of substantial interest because they can be reduced from...

In a large class of hazard models with proportional unobserved heterogeneity, the distribution of the heterogeneity among survivors converges to a gamma distribution. This convergence is often rapid. We derive this result as a general result for exponential mixtures and explore its implications...

In housing markets with asymmetric information list prices may signal unobserved properties of the house or the seller. Asymmetric information is the starting point of many models for the housing market. In this paper, we estimate the causal effect of list-price reductions to test for the...

We combine micro and macro unemployment duration data to study the effects of the business cycle on the outflow from unemployment. We allow the cycle to affect individual exit probabilities of unemployed workers as well as the composition of the total inflow into unemployment. We estimate the...

In this paper we develop a structural model for job search behavior of students entering the labor market. The model includes endogenous search effort and on-the-job search. Since students usually do not start a regular job before graduation but start job search earlier, our model is non...

In this article we develop an Instrumental Variable estimation procedure that corrects for possible endogeneity of a variable in a duration model. We assume a Generalized Accelerated Failure Time (GAFT) model. This model is based on transforming the durations and assuming a distribution for...

Labor markets in Western countries are becoming more and more flexible, thereby meeting the needs of employers. Yet the new flexibility also offers opportunities to workers, while at the same time bears the risk of long-term exclusion. This paper deals with unequal chances on the contemporary...

In this paper we estimate, for the 1989-93 period in Belgium, the effect of vocational classroom training on the rate of transition out of unemployment. We show that rationing of the demand for training increases the unemployment duration of non-participants, an effect neglected in programme...

In this paper, I consider the identification of lagged duration dependence in multiple spells without using the assumtion that there are additional regressors orthogonal to the individual effects. The non-parametric identification strategy is applied to the multiple non-employment spells of 2066...