We test whether households that face prospective home equity losses during a house price downturn use divorce to shed debt. We study the Dutch context, where qualifying homeowners can buy into a mortgage guarantee scheme that insures the lender against borrower default and transfers the risk to...

Agricultural credit is one of the most crucial inputs in all agricultural development programmes. Access of rural credit has still remained scarce in India. Primary Agriculture Credit Societies (PACS) working at grass-root level, having direct contact with the rural people and meet their...

This paper analyzes the impact of load factor, facility and generator types on the productivity of Korean electric power plants. In order to capture important differences in the effect of load policy on power output, we use a semiparametric smooth coefficient (SPSC) model that allows us to model...

Post-communist labor markets provide an interesting laboratory since unemployment rates grew from zero to double digits and gender differences began to vary greatly across these countries. We provide the first systematic analysis of the determinants of the gender unemployment gap in the Czech...

Social insurance programs typically comprise sick leave insurance. An important policy parameter is how the cost of sick leave are shared between workers, firms, and the social security system. We show that this sharing rule affects not only absence behavior, but also workers' subsequent health....

We evaluate the impacts of a compulsory dialogue meeting for long-term sick-listed workers in Norway. The meeting is organised by the local social security administration after around six months of absence, and its purpose is to bring together the absentee, the employer, and the family physician...

We develop a stylized principal-agent model with moral hazard and adverse selection to provide a unified framework for understanding some of the most salient features of the recent physician payment reform in Ontario and its impact on physician behavior. These features include: (1) physicians...

This paper studies the design of optimal contracts in dynamic environments where agents learn by doing. We derive a condition under which contracts are fully incentive compatible. A closed-form solution is obtained when agents have CARA utility. It shows that human capital accumulation...

Severance pay, a fixed-sum payment to workers at job separation, has been the focus of intense policy concern for the last several decades, but much of this concern is unearned. The design of the ideal separation package is outlined and severance pay emerges as a natural component of job...

In most countries, the unemployed are entitled to unemployment benefits only if they have previously worked a minimum period of time. This institutional feature creates a sharp change at eligibility in the disutility from unemployment and may distort the duration of jobs. In this paper, we...