With the aging of the society, issues concerning the reform of the Dutch health care system are ranked high on the political agenda. Sensible reforms of the health care system for the elderly require a thorough understanding of the health status of the old and of its dynamics preceding death....

In this paper we specify and estimate three state duration models of work, sickness and exit from the job to explain individual absenteeism behaviour of primary school teachers. There is a large variation of sickness absenteeism records across schools and absenteeism records of workers within a...

This paper aims to assess empirically the relative size of incentive effects and health for the retirement decision. We specify and estimate a dynamic model for retirement behaviour that explicitly takes account of eligibility conditions and replacement rates of alternative exit routes from the...

In The Netherlands, the average exit rate out of welfare is dramatically low. Most welfare recipients have to comply with guidelines on job search effort that are imposed by the welfare agency. If they do not, then a sanction in the form of a temporarily benefit reduction can be imposed. This...

In this paper we present and estimate a synthesis of previous equilibrium search models: allowing for continuous distributions of workers opportunity costs of employment, as well as firms' productivities. The model allows for on-the-job search, and we assume that job offer arrival rates for...

With informational frictions on the labor market, hedonic wage regressions provide biased estimates of the willingness to pay for job attributes. We show that a recent theoretical result, which states that variation in job durations does provide good estimates in case of a basic on-the-job...

This paper analyzes the effect of unemployment insurance sanctions on the transition rate from unemployment to employment. Sanctions are punitive benefits reductions that are supposed to make recipients comply with cer­tain minimum requirements concerning search behavior. We use a unique set of...

This paper analyzes the determinants of lay-offs, job-to-job movements and total separations with a unique data set that combines information on individual firms and their workers. We are in particular interested in whether the lay-off policy of firms can explain the relatively high level of...

In the past decades several features of U.S. unemployment dynamics have been investigated empirically. The original focus of research was on the duration of unemployment. In later studies the cyclicality of incidence and duration, compositional effects and duration dependence of the exit rate...

We analyze the impact of unemployment benefits and minimum wages using an equilibrium search model which allows for dispersion of benefits and productivity levels, job-to-job transitions, and structural and frictional unemployment. The estimation method uses readily available aggregate data on...