Activation policies aimed at getting working-age people off benefits and into work have become a buzzword in labour market policies. Yet they are defined and implemented differently across OECD countries and their success rates vary too. The Great Recession has posed a severe stress test for...

Using variations in unemployment insurance policies over time and across U.S. states, this paper provides evidence that allowing unemployed workers to delay the collection of benefits increases their job-finding rate. In a model with discrete job take-up decisions, benefit entitlement,...

We document two potential biases in recent analyses of UI benefit extensions using boundary-based identification: from using county-level aggregates and from across-border policy spillovers. To examine the first bias, we use a regression discontinuity (RD) approach that accounts for measurement...

This paper studies the financial sustainability of the Albanian pension fund and assesses possible options for its reform. The paper concludes that the pension fund is not sustainable in its current form and proposes for the urban scheme a combination of parametric changes to the existing...

Work absence is an important part of the individual decision on actual working hours. This paper focuses on sickness absence in Europe and develops a stylized model where absence is part of the labor-leisure decision made by workers and the production decision made by profit-maximizing firms,...