This paper investigates whether cannabis use leads to worse mental health. To do so, we account for common unobserved factors affecting mental health and cannabis consumption by modeling mental health jointly with the dynamics of cannabis use. Our main finding is that using cannabis increases...

This Paper studies the wage effects of the use of alcohol and tobacco. The analysis based on a recent survey in the Netherlands shows that for males the use of tobacco has a negative wage effect of about 10% while the use of alcohol has a positive wage effect of about the same size. Smoking and...

We propose a new econometric estimation method for analysing the probability of leaving un-employment using uncompleted spells from repeated cross-section data, which can be especially useful when panel data are not available. The proposed method-of-moments-based estimator has two important...

This paper examines heterogeneity in price stickiness using a large, original, set of individual price data collected at the retail level for the computation of the French CPI. For that purpose, we estimate at a very high level of disaggregation competing-risks duration models that distinguish...

The lemons model assumes that owners of used cars have an informational advantage over potential buyers with respect to the quality of their vehicles. Owners of bad cars will try to sell them to unsuspecting buyers while owners of good cars will hold on to theirs. Consequently, the quality of...

Recent evaluations of active labour market policies are not very optimistic about their effectiveness to bring unemployed back to work. An important reason is that unemployed get locked-in, that is they reduce their effort to find a regular job. This Paper uses an administrative data set from...

In the mid-1980s, several European countries, characterized by high levels of employment protection, introduced fixed-term contracts. Since then most accessions to employment have been through fixed-term contracts. This Paper studies the duration pattern of fixed-term contracts and the...

This paper applies semiparametric regression models to shed light on the relation-ship between body weight and labor market outcomes in Germany. We find conclusive evidence that these relationships are poorly described by linear or quadratic OLS specifications, which have been the main...

In the second half of the 1990s Switzerland introduced an ambitious active labour market policy (ALMP) encompassing a variety of programmes. We evaluate the effects of these programmes on individual employment probability using unusually informative data originating from administrative records....

This Paper presents a methodology to identify net demand shocks as well as wage rigidities in heterogeneous labour markets on the basis of nonparametric regression. We show how this approach can be used to make suggestions for immigration policy in economies with labour market rigidities. In an...