In the large literature on firm performance, economists have given little attention to entrepreneurs. We use deaths of more than 500 entrepreneurs as a source of exogenous variation, and ask whether this variation can explain shifts in firm performance. Using longitudinal data, we find large and...

The transition from centrally planned to market economy involves a process of massive occupational change that has been largely neglected in the literature. This paper investigates this process using data from the 1995 Estonian Labour Force Survey. We find that between 35 and 50 percent of wage...

In this paper we provide a comparative analysis of the extent and determinants of labour mobility in the Czech Republic during 1994-1998. Our analysis is motivated by the fact that labour mobility is crucial for an efficient allocation of resources and the transition economies are often viewed...

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...

This paper investigates whether job offers arrive more frequently for those in employment than for those in unemployment. To this end, we take advantage of a unique Australian data set which contains information on both accepted and rejected job offers. Our estimation strategy takes account of...

We evaluate the effect of active labour market programs on the duration of unemployment in a reward or punish system. In Switzerland, unemployment benefits are conditional upon program attendance after 7 months of unemployment duration. In the evaluation we allow for selectivity affecting the...

The vocational employment training program is the most ambitious and expensive training program in Sweden and a cornerstone of labor market policy. We analyze its causal effects on the individual transition rate from unemployment to employment by exploiting variation in the timing of treatment...

We analyze incentives to develop entrepreneurial ideas for venture capitalists (VCs) and incumbent firms. If VCs are sufficiently better at judging an idea's value and if it is sufficiently more costly to patent low than high value ideas, VCs acquire valuable ideas, develop them beyond the level...

This paper investigates the dynamic relationship between self-employment and unemployment rates. On the one hand, high unemployment rates may lead to start-up activity of self-employed individuals (the 'refugee' effect). On the other hand, higher rates of self employment may indicate increased...

A model of the labour market under firing restrictions and endogenous quits is constructed. It is shown that in the spirit of Blanchard and Summers (1988), the model can generate multiple equilibria, with a low-quits/high-unemployment equilibrium coexisting with a high-quits/low-unemployment...