For several European states, including Romania, the European integration process has overlapped with the effects of the economic and financial crisis. The consequences of such a situation are apparently contradictory. On one hand, the crisis lowers the European integration process in view of...

Using household survey data for Albania, this study compare decision-making about human capital investment in remittance-receiving households and non-remittance-receiving households. The Cox proportional hazard model is used to capture the effects of remittances. The crucial assumption in the...

Local governors that hold office for longer periods are thought to be more likely to collude with various groups to increase their own benefit through long-term interaction. There is no term limit for local governors in Japan, seemingly causing such collusive behavior. However, since 1987, local...

In small samples and especially in the case of small true default probabilities, standard approaches to credit default probability estimation have certain drawbacks. Most importantly, standard estimators tend to underestimate the true default probability which is of course an undesirable...

Why do policies often seem to converge across countries at the same time? This question has been studied extensively in the diffusion literature. However, past research has not examined complex choice environments, especially where there are many alternatives. My paper aims to fill this gap in...

Credit ratings are ordinal predictions for the default risk of an obligor. To evaluate the accuracy of such predictions commonly used measures are the Accuracy Ratio or, equivalently, the Area under the ROC curve. The disadvantage of these measures is that they treat default as a binary variable...

We examine how unemployment schemes and liquidity constraints affect re-employment probabilities and unemployment duration. In particular we investigate to which extent those schemes, through employment services and search requirements, can offset the expected perverse effect of benefits on...

This paper investigates the wage and employment perspectives of low-wage labour market entrants, using panel data from the UK, the Netherlands, and Germany. We apply a competing risks hazard model of transitions from low pay to higher pay, to unemployment or to inactivity. Low pay is found to be...

Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (GSOEP), we analyze whether necessity and opportunity entrepreneurs differ in terms of self-employment duration. We find that the two types of entrepreneurs differ regarding their duration in self-employment. Once controlled for educational...

Unemployment durations are determined by a number of factors. According to mainstream economics theory, unemployment durations are shorter in a more flexible labour market. In this paper, we hypothesize that workers who had a temporary contract before the spell of unemployment will experience...