During the last decade several empirical studies have stressed the importance of norms and social interactions for explaining sickness absence behavior. In this context public discussions about the intentions of the insurance, and of the rights and duties of the receivers, may be important for...

Are multinational enterprises MNEs more likely than none-MNEs, owing to their footlose charater, to close down their plants? The results from using a panel o all Swedish manufacturing plants over the period 1993 and 2002 suggest that MNE plants, and in particular Swedish MNE plants, have higher...

We examine a new general class of hazard rate models for survival data, containing a parametric and a nonparametric component. Both can be a mix of a time effect and (possibly time-dependent) marker of covariate effects. A number of well-known models are special cases. In a counting process...

This study investigates how well weekly Google search volumes track and predict bank failures in the United States between 2007 and 2012, contributing to the expanding literature that exploits internet data for the prediction of events. Different duration models with time-varying covariates are...

Using administrative data from the state of Georgia, this paper finds that, on average, across all firms, employing undocumented workers reduces a firm’s hazard of exit by 19 percent. The advantage to firms from employing undocumented workers increases as more firms in the industry do so,...

The effect of the single currency on the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) hypothesis is examined in this study for the 15 EU countries, vis a vis the US dollar, before and after the advent of the euro. Standard as well as nonlinear unit root tests are employed on the time series dimension. Unit...

Aggregate housing demand shocks are an important source of house price fluctuations in the standard macroeconomic models, and through the collateral channel, they drive macroeconomic fluctuations. These reduced-form shocks, however, fail to generate a highly volatile price-to-rent ratio that...

The responsiveness of house prices to monetary policy shocks depends both on the nature of the shock - expansionary versus contractionary - and on city-specific housing supply elasticities. We test and find supporting evidence for the hypothesis that expansionary monetary policy shocks have a...