Unemployment insurance agencies may combat moral hazard by punishing refusals to apply to assigned vacancies. However, the possibility to report sick creates an additional moral hazard, since during sickness spells, minimum requirements on search behavior do not apply. This reduces the ex-ante...

The generosity of the Unemployment Insurance system (UI) plays a central role for the job search behavior of unemployed individuals. Standard search theory predicts that an increase in UI benefit generosity, either in terms of benefit duration or entitlement, has a negative impact on the job...

In some countries including Germany unemployed workers can increase their income during job search by taking up marginal employment up to a threshold without any deduction from their benefits. Marginal employment can be considered as a wage subsidy as it lowers labour costs for firms owing to...

Unemployment rates are often higher for migrants than for natives. This could result from longer periods of unemployment as well as from shorter periods of employment. This paper jointly examines male native-migrant differences in the duration of unemployment and subsequent employment using...

In this paper we seek a robust methodology to measure the relative public spending efficiency of 19 OECD countries over the period 1980-2000. Based on the functional classification of government expenditure, we decompose total public spending into its separate accounts and we employ a...

This paper empirically examines the relationship between fiscal decentralization and public sector efficiency. A country-level dataset is used to measure public sector efficiency in delivering education and health services and the new indices are regressed on well-established decentralization...

This paper examines the relationship between the regulatory and supervision framework and the productivity of banks in 22 countries over the period 1999-2006. We follow a semi-parametric two-step approach that combines Malmquist index estimates with bootstrap regressions. The results indicate...

In this paper, we use a semi-parametric two-stage model to examine the effect of bank-specific, industry-specific and macroeconomic determinants of bank efficiency. This method, proposed by Simar and Wilson (2007), relaxes several deficiencies of previous two-stage analyses, which regress...

The aim of this study is to provide a methodology for the joint estimation of efficiency and market power of individual banks. The proposed method utilizes the separate implications of the new empirical industrial organization and the stochastic frontier literatures and suggests identification...

The objective of this article is 2-fold. First, it provides an empirical assessment of the cost and profit stochastic frontiers based on a panel dataset of Greek commercial banks over the period 1993 to 2005. Second, on the basis of the same sample, it also compares the most widely used...