Unemployment insurance systems include monitoring of unemployed workers and punitive sanctions if job search requirements are violated. We analyze the effect of sanctions on the ensuing job quality, notably on wage rates and hours worked, and we examine how often a sanction leads to a lower...

Individual labour market transitions from unemployment into temporary work are often succeeded by a transition from temporary into regular work. We investigate whether temporary work increases the transition rate to regular work. In that case, temporary work may enhance labour market efficiency....

We examine to what extent pathways to statutory retirement other than employment are associated with adverse health conditions as measured by increased cause-specific mortality risk during retirement. To do so, we estimate a dependent competing risks model using Dutch administrative data. We...

In this project we study joint retirement of couples in Europe. We characterize various empirical regularities and use a model for simultaneous duration variables developed in Honor e and de Paula (2014). Whereas conventionally used duration models cannot account for joint retirement, our model...

Unemployment insurance recipients in the Netherlands were for a long time exempted from the requirement to actively search for a job when they reached the age of 57.5. We study how this exemption affected the job finding rates of the recipients involved. We find evidence that the job finding...

We use a recent policy change in the Netherlands to study how changes in search requirements for the older unemployed affect their transition rates to employment, early retirement and sickness/disability benefits. The reform, becoming effective on January 1st 2004, requires the elderly to...

This article develops a theoretical model for evaluating mandatory activation of welfare recipients in complex activation programmes. The model aims to summarize and describe heterogeneous content that is difficult to comprehend because of local variations, staff characteristics, or other...

Using survey data from a representative sample of Dutch households, we estimate the strength of the precautionary saving motive by eliciting subjective expectations on future consumption. We find that expected consumption risk is higher for the young and the self-employed, and is correlated...

Are there negative health effects from losing the job? We analyze the causal effect of job displacement on diabetes incidence and prevalence. Type 2 diabetes is an illness that is directly affected by lifestyle factors and psychosocial stress, and with severe sideeffects deteriorating the...