Child birth leads to a break in a woman's employment history and is considered one reason for the relatively poor labor market outcomes observed for women compared to men. However, the time spent at home after child birth varies significantly across mothers and is likely driven by observed and,...

Infinitesimal perturbation analysis is a widely used approach to assess the input sensitivities of stochas- tic dynamic systems in the classical simulation context. In this paper, we introduce an efficient nu- merical approach to undertake Infinitesimal perturbation analysis in the context of...

Bayesian inference relies heavily on numerical Markov chain Monte carlo (MCMC) methods for the estimation of the typically intractable high-dimensional posterior distributions and requires specific inputs. In this paper we introduce a new general and efficient numerical approach to address...

This paper analyzes patterns in the earnings development of young labor market entrants over their life cycle. We identify four distinctly different types of transition patterns between discrete earnings states in a large administrative data set. Further, we investigate the effects of labor...

Two approaches for model-based clustering of categorical time series based on time- homogeneous first-order Markov chains are discussed. For Markov chain clustering the in- dividual transition probabilities are fixed to a group-specific transition matrix. In a new approach called Dirichlet...