One of the most prominent trends in OECD countries over the last 30 years has been the sharp increase in incidence of early retirement, and in particular the permanent take-up of disability benefits. In this paper we construct a theoretical model that shows how occupational choices, in terms of...

This paper looks inside the “black box” of the family and examines the determinants of inter vivos transfers in the form of allowances given to children. We consider in a simple model two main competing explanations for the transfer of money from parents to children in the form of regular...

This paper investigates the patterns and determinants of life satisfaction in Germany following reunification. We implement a new fixed-effect estimator for ordinal life satisfaction in the German Socio-Economic Panel and find negative effects on life satisfaction from being recently fired,...

The question we address in this paper is which factors influence the quitting decision of public sector teachers in England and Wales, using a nationally representative panel data set over 1997-2003. We document the outcomes of former teachers, fit single and competing-risks duration models and...

There is currently a worldwide shortage of registered nurses, driven by large shifts in both the demand for and supply of nurses. Consequently, various policies to increase the recruitment and retention of nurses are under discussion, in particular, the role that wage increases might have in...

Most immigrant groups experience higher rates of unemployment than the host countries native population, but it is as yet unclear whether differences in job search behaviour, or its success, can help explain this gap. In this paper, we investigate how the job search methods of unemployed...

In this paper, we directly test Becker’s theory of employee discrimination using matched worker-workplace data from Britain. Based on a structural model with individual and firm heterogeneity, we develop and test two predictions. Firstly, if white employees have a taste for discrimination they...

Contacts and the way they are organized in di¤erent economic systemsmatter for the economy. In this paper we introduce the notion of Relational Capital to model contacts. Contacts are an input into sold output in our macro model based on matching theory (Pissarides, 1990). We argue that the...