This paper exploits the informational value of search theory, after Lancaster and Chesher (1983), in conjunction with survey data on the unemployed to calculate key reservation wage and duration elasticities for most EU-15 nations.

This paper examines the determinants of unemployment duration in a competing risks framework with two destination states, namely, inactivity and employment. The major innovation is our recognition of defective risks. We first use a polynomial hazard function to test for the presence of...