Causal effects of a policy change on the hazard rates of a duration outcome variable are not identified from a comparison of spells before and after the policy change when there is unobserved heterogeneity in the effects and no model structure is imposed. We develop a discontinuity approach that...

Increasing the labour market participation of single parents, whether to boost incomes or reduce welfare spending, is a major policy objectives in a number of countries. This paper presents causal evidence on the impact of work search requirements on single parents' transitions into work and...

We analyse the pattern of work and other labour market states, such as unemployment and out-of-labour-force, over the life course, by making use of a long retrospective panel of older Europeans. Based on stochastic simulations of a reduced form transition probability model, we document to what...

We develop an equilibrium model of on-the-job search with ex-ante heterogeneous workers and firms, aggregate uncertainty and vacancy creation. The model produces rich dynamics in which the distributions of unemployed workers, vacancies and worker-firm matches evolve stochastically over time. We...

This paper uses pooled cross-section data on recent school leavers in Ireland to model the determinants of labour market status and wages for young adults. Firstly we use a multinomial logit model to analyze whether individuals exit school to employment, unemployment or higher education. Family...

We specify a structural life-cycle model of consumption, labour supply and job mobility in an economy with search frictions that allows us to distinguish between different sources of risk and to estimate their effects. The sources of risk are shocks to productivity, job destruction, the process...

Youth unemployment in Ghana increases in parental wealth. This occurs because, without unemployment insurance, only workers with sufficiently high parental wealth can afford to remain unemployed, and do so to search for scarce, high-productivity jobs. I estimate a structural model of endogenous...

This paper estimates the effects of entering the labour market when the economy is weak on subsequent living standards using consistent long-running household survey data from the UK. In line with previous research, we find persistent scarring effects on employment and earnings. However, we also...

Do households value access to free health insurance when making labor supply decisions? We answer this question using the introduction of universal health insurance in Mexico, the Seguro Popular (SP), in 2002. The SP targeted individuals not covered by Social Security and broke the link between...

In this paper, we estimate a collective model of household consumption and test the restrictions of collective rationality using z-conditional demands in the context of a large Conditional Cash Transfer programme in rural Mexico. We show that the model is able to explain the impacts the...