Over the last 15 years, the Netherlands has experienced a tremendous jobs boom, mainly in services and female employment. This has often been related to changes in the Dutch institutional environment. Using a model which allows for direct utility of work, we find that institutional arrangements...

This paper presents a theory explaining the labor market matching process through microeconomic incentives. There are heterogeneous variations in the characteristics of workers and jobs, and firms face adjustment costs in responding to these variations. Matches and separations are described...

German family policy underwent a reform in 2007, when the new instrument of "Elterngeld" replaced the previous "Erziehungsgeld". The transfer programs differ in various dimensions. We study the effects on the labor supply of young mothers, by comparing behavior before and after the reform. We...

In this paper, we develop an allocation model of workers differentiated by their field of study to test whether international differences in the wage structure can be explained by differences in labor demand and supply in each country. The model explicitly takes into account the effects of...

Using the Dutch Labour Force Survey 1991-2001, the authors investigate the incidence of part-time employment in the country with the highest part-time employment rate of the OECD countries. Women fulfil most part-time jobs, but nevertheless a considerable fraction of men works part-time as well....

Using Bulgarian Integrated Household Surveys for 1995, 1997 and 2001 this paper explores determinants of labor force status – not working, public sector employment, private sector employment and self-employment – and earnings for each of the three employment sectors. We find that while...