Empirical and theoretical studies suggest that employment behaviour varies with the state of the labour market since hiring and firings costs depend on the availability of labour. Extending earlier empirical work on this subject, we test for state dependence in employment adjustment and in the...

We develop a new indicator of labour market tightness, based on the pure calendar time changes in individuals’ transition rates from unemployment to employment.Based on Norwegian register data from the 1989-2002 period, we show that this indicator,in contrast to the aggregate rate of...

In this paper we discuss a general framework for analyzing labor supply behavior in the presence of complicated budget- and quantity constraints of which some are unobserved. The point of departure is that an individual’s labor supply decision can be considered as a choice from a set of...

During the upswing in the Norwegian labour market after the peak of unemployment in the post-war period in the early 1990s, the inflow to unemployment fell by one fourth from October 1991 to October 1993. In contrast, the expected unemployment duration remained fairly constant, whether measured...

Building on register data describing monthly labour market status for the whole Norwegian population 1992-95, we estimate grouped competing risk hazard rate models for transitions between employment, unemployment and non-participation. The models impose no parametric restrictions on either...