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...

We provide Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms for computing the bandwidth matrix for multivariate kernel density estimation. Our approach is based on treating the elements of the bandwidth matrix as parameters to be estimated, which we do by optimizing the likelihood cross-validation...

The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve is used to describe the performance of a diagnostic test which classifies observations into two groups. We introduce a new method for selecting bandwidths when computing kernel estimates of ROC curves. Our technique allows for interaction between...

We propose a new method for forecasting age-specific mortality and fertility rates observed over time. Our approach allows for smooth functions of age, is robust for outlying years due to wars and epidemics, and provides a modelling framework that is easily adapted to allow for constraints and...

We propose new tools for visualizing large numbers of functional data in the form of smooth curves or surfaces. The proposed tools include functional versions of the bagplot and boxplot, and make use of the first two robust principal component scores, Tukey's data depth and highest density...

We study methods for constructing confidence intervals, and confidence bands, for estimators of receiver operating characteristics. Particular emphasis is placed on the way in which smoothing should be implemented, when estimating either the characteristic itself or its variance. We show that...