This paper examines the determinants of very low birth weight infant (or neonatal) mortality using the Taiwan National Health Insurance Research database from 1997 to 2009. After infants are discharged from hospital, it is not possible to track their mortality, so the Cox proportional hazard...

We present a new framework for the joint estimation of the default-free government term structure and corporate credit spread curves. By using a data set of liquid, German mark denominated bonds, we show that this yields more realistic spreads than traditionally obtained spread curves that...

In many Western countries, a sizeable group of people live on welfare benefits for a long time. Many of them suffer from mental health issues. This paper studies the labor market and mental health effects of an activation program targeting these long-term inactive people. We exploit the...

Under relative performance pay, other-regarding workers internalize the negative externality they impose on other workers. In one form -increased own effort reduces others' payoffs- this results in other-regarding individuals depressing efforts. In another form punishment reduces the payoff of...

We find that investor sentiment should affect a firm's employment policy in a world with moral hazard and noise traders. Consistent with the model's predictions, we show that higher sentiment among US investors leads to: (1) higher employment growth worldwide; (2) lower labor productivity, as the...

This paper presents an alternative implementation of firm-level collective wage bargaining, where bargaining proceeds as a finite sequence of sessions between a firm and a union of variable size. We investigate the impact of such a `gradual' union on the wage-employment contract in an economy...

In this paper we derive a structural measure for labor market density based on the Ellison and Glasear (1997) "Index for industry concentration". This labor market density measure serves as a proxy for the number of workers that can reach a certain work area within a reasonal amount of traveling...

In this laboratory experiment we study the use of strategic ignorance to delegate real authority within a firm. A worker can gather information on investment projects, while a manager makes the implementation decision. The manager can monitor the worker. This allows her to better exploit the...

The paper revisits the problem of wage bargaining between a firm and multiple workers. We show that the Subgame Perfect Equilibrium of the extensive-form game proposed by Stole and Zwiebel (1996a) does not imply a profile of wages and profits that coincides with the Shapley values as claimed in...