This paper studies a program that extends the maximum duration of unemployment benefits from 30 weeks to 209 weeks. Interestingly, this program is targeted to individuals aged 50 years or older, living in certain eligible regions in Austria. In the evaluation, I use sharp discontinuities in...

This paper studies how changes in the two key parameters of unemployment insurance – the benefit replacement rate (RR) and the potential duration of benefits (PBD) – affect the duration of unemployment. In 1989, the Austrian government made unemployment insurance more generous by changing,...

This paper investigates how precisely short-term, job-search oriented training programs as opposed to long-term, human capital intensive training programs work. We evaluate and compare their effects on time until job entry, stability of employment, and earnings. Further, we examine the...

We identify the causal effect of lump-sum severance payments on non-employment duration in Norway by exploiting a discontinuity in eligibility at age 50. We find that a severance payment worth 1.2 months' earnings at the median lowers the fraction re-employed after a year by seven percentage...

This paper develops a specification of the credit scoring model with high discriminatory power to analyze data on loans at the retail banking market. Parametric and non- parametric approaches are employed to produce three models using logistic regression (parametric) and one model using...

Business climate indicators are used to receive early signals for turning points in the general business cycle. Therefore methods for the detection of turning points in time series are required. Estimations of slopes of a smooth component in the data can be calculated with local polynomial...