In order to con¯ne excessive levels of temporary layo®s, US ¯rms are taxed - albeit incom-pletely - according to the unemployment insurance bene¯ts claimed by their laid o® workers.In contrast, German construction ¯rms are not charged according to their layo® historyand should thus have...

Employing a large individual-level administrative dataset from Great Britain, coveringthe period 1999-2005, we analyse the factors inuencing the length of unemployment benetsclaimant periods with subsequent transition to re-employment. To this end, this individual-level data is merged with a...

For the evaluation of policy reforms numerous governments use, among other sources,administrative social security data. Although this data is large and contains detailed in-formation about policy measures, it inherits several limitations due to the administrativeprocess of generating data. This...

Many popular estimators for duration models require independent competing risks orindependent censoring. In contrast, copula based estimators are also consistent in presence ofdependent competing risks. In this paper we suggest a computationally convenient extensionof the Copula Graphic...

Empirical evidence from the UK market is brought to bear on recent theories of closed-endfund discounts. Market pricing of skill, relative to the fees charged for it, accounts for asignificant portion of discount variation, but cannot explain the rarity of index funds orwhy they trade at a...

The CAPM can explain closed-end fund (CEF) discounts as a consequence of the higherbetas on CEF shares than on their underlying portfolios. The difference in betas is muchgreater for international funds and for bond funds than for domestic equity funds. CEFshares carry both more idiosyncratic...

In open-end funds, net inflows are positively correlated with past performance. This study investigates how past net asset value (NAV) returns affect the premium on closed-end funds traded in the United States and the United Kingdom. Past performance is significantly priced in stock funds,...