Atypical employment, such as temporary, on-call, and contract work, has been found disproportionately to attract the jobless. But there is no consensus in the literature as to the labour market consequences of such job choice by unemployed individuals. Using data from the Current Population...

A thorny problem in identifying the determinants of reservation wages and particularly the role of continued joblessness in their evolution is the simultaneity issue. We deploy a natural control function approach to the problem that involves conditioning elapsed duration on completed...

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...

Using Portuguese data, this paper investigates the effects of job search methods on escape rates from unemployment and of job-finding methods on earnings. The effectiveness of the job search process is also evaluated in terms of the periodicity of the resulting job match. Emphasis is accorded...

This paper examines the determinants of unemployment duration in a competing risks framework with two destination states, namely, inactivity and employment. The major innovation is our recognition of defective risks. We first use a polynomial hazard function to test for the presence of...

The Swedish adult education program known as the Knowledge Lift is unprecedented in its size and scope, aiming to raise the skill level of all low-skilled workers towards the medium level. This paper evaluates the effects of program participation on individual labor market outcomes, notably...