Any serious empirical study of factor substitutability has to allow the data to display complementarity as well as substitutability. The standard approach reflecting this idea is a translog specification this is also the approach used by numerous studies analyzing the relative capital-skill...

Evidence from a sample of countries show that people roughly spend as much time watching television as earning their living. Moreover, television viewing and work hours are positively correlated across countries. A simple model based on complementarities in the organization of free time is...

In order to offer a balanced assessment of the role of minimum wages in the Welfare State, seven basic questions need to be answered: (i) Why is the minimum wage a useful redistributive tool?; (ii) How binding are minimum wage floors in different countries?; (iii) To what extent do minimum wages...

The evaluation of interventions such as active labor market policies or medical programs by means of a randomized controlled trial is often considered the gold standard. However, randomized experiments might face severe shortcomings especially if performed at the group level. One such problem is...

In this paper, we specify and estimate a structurally dependent competing risks model for the transitions out of unemployment into either new job or recall. The recall probability is allowed to affect the search intensity for new jobs.

Propensity score matching is a prominent strategy to reduce imbalance in observational studies. However, if imbalance is considerable and the control reservoir is small, either one has to match one control to several treated units or, alternatively, discard many treated persons. The first...