The paper investigates whether (unsubsidised) fixed-term contracts (FTCs) are a means of integration for the unemployed in the West German labour market. This is done by analysing whether entering into an FTC improves the employment opportunities of an unemployed person in terms of the...

This paper studies how cognitive and social skills in childhood are related to the duration of unemployment in adolescence and early adulthood. I estimate a flexible proportional hazard rate model for the probability of making a transition from unemployment to employment during an individual’s...

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...

This paper analyzes the impact of job creation schemes (JCSs) on job search outcomes in the context of the turbulent East German labor market in the aftermath of the German reunification. High job destruction characterized the economic environment. JCSs were heavily used in order to cushion this...

This paper analyzes the impact on fertility of changes in national expenditure for family allowances, maternity and parental leave benefits, and childcare subsidies. To do so, I estimate a model for the timing of births using individual-level data from 16 Western European countries supplemented...

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...

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...