The paper studies the determinants of labor force participation by East German women after unification. To isolate the role of preferences on labor force participation from individual characteristics, we develop a panel data model that simultaneously explains participation, employment and wages....

In the early 1990s, the Dutch social partners agreed upon transforming the generous and actuarially unfair PAYG early retirement schemes into less generous and actuarially fair capital funded schemes. The starting dates of the transitional arrangements varied by industry sector. In this study,...

In this paper, we study gains and losses that accrue to natives because of immigration. The gain on the aggregated level is called the ?immigration surplus?, which can be seen as analogous to a consumer surplus. We derive changes in the earnings of native owners of production factors by...

Using the Dutch Labour Force Survey 1991-2001, the authors investigate the incidence of part-time employment in the country with the highest part-time employment rate of the OECD countries. Women fulfil most part-time jobs, but nevertheless a considerable fraction of men works part-time as well....

In the empirical literature on labour supply, several static models are developed to incorporate constraints on working hours. These models do not address to what extent working hours are constrained within jobs, and to what extent working hours can be adjusted by means of changing employer. The...

The Dutch mandatory pension system consists of two parts: a public pay-as-you-go part that provides a minimum income to all Dutch inhabitants over age 64; and an occupation-specific capital-funded part that provides supplementary retirement income. The goal of this paper is to test for the effect...

As wives generally are younger than their husbands, and as they also have a higher life expectancy, wives generally have larger incentives to save for old age than their husbands. This paper analyses the household members? attitudes towards saving for old age, and the relation with the household...

The apprenticeship system is the most important source of formal post-secondary training in Germany. Our paper contributes to the ongoing debate as to why firms are willing to invest in such training even though many apprentices will leave the training firm soon after completion of the...

This paper tests the predictive value of subjective labour supply data for adjustments in working hours over time. The idea is that if subjective labour supply data help to predict next year?s working hours, such data must contain at least some information on individual labour supply...

Parts of the Dutch tax reform 2001 are directed towards fiscal partners in a household and aim at lowering the marginal tax burden of the partner with the lowest (potential) labour income. An important goal of the reform is to increase the employment rate of these partners, which are in majority...