In an efficiency wage economy, lump-sum severance pay from which shirkers can be excluded raises employment. However, severance payments are usually related to wages. It is shown that earnings-related, mandated severance pay will have ambiguous employment effects if effort can be varied...

Decisions by firms and individuals on the extent of their tax payments have generally been treated as separate choices. Empirically, a positive relationship between corporate and personal income tax evasion can be observed. The theoretical analysis in this paper shows that a manager's decision...

Unemployment Insurance Savings Accounts (UISAs) entitle workers to unemployment benefits at the expense of future pension payments. Therefore, such accounts make unemployment less attractive, intensify job search, and raise employment. In the present paper the wage and employment consequences of...

We analyze the effect of being born in a recession on the mortality rate later in life in conjunction with social class. We use individual data records from Dutch registers of birth, marriage, and death certificates, covering the period 1815-2000, and we merge these with historical data on...

Evidently, the benefit-structure of the unemployment insurance has a significant influence on profits and trade union utility. We show for a wage bargaining model that a stronger earnings relationship of unemployment benefits may reduce wages and increase employment. This raises the question as...

Consider a setting where a treatment that starts at some point during a spell (e.g. in unemployment) may impact on the hazard rate of the spell duration, and where the impact may be heterogeneous across subjects. We provide Monte Carlo evidence on the feasibility of estimating the distribution...

Status considerations with respect to consumption give rise to negative externalities because individuals do not take into account that their decisions affect the relative consumption position of others. Further, status concerns create incentives for excessive labour supply in competitive...

Cultural diversity is a complex and multi-faceted concept. Commonly used quantitative measures of the spatial distribution of culturally-defined groups – such as segregation, isolation or concentration indexes - are often only capable of identifying just one aspect of this distribution. The...

In their IZA Discussion Paper 10247, Johansson and Lee claim that the main result (Proposition 3) in Abbring and Van den Berg (2003b) does not hold. We show that their claim is incorrect. At a certain point within their line of reasoning, they make a rather basic error while transforming one...