We study a mixed hitting-time (MHT) model that specifies durations as the first time a Lévy process - a continuous-time process with stationary and independent increments - crosses a heterogeneous threshold. Such models are of substantial interest because they can be reduced from...

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 a large class of hazard models with proportional unobserved heterogeneity, the distribution of the heterogeneity among survivors converges to a gamma distribution. This convergence is often rapid. We derive this result as a general result for exponential mixtures and explore its implications...

We investigate the role of industry and region-specific conditions for the survival of new businesses in innovative and in other manufacturing industries. The data comprises all German manufacturing start-ups of the 1992 to 2005 period. In contrast to studies for some other countries, we find...

Shared-frailty survival models specify that systematic unobserved determinants of duration outcomes are identical within groups of individuals. We consider random-effects likelihood-based statistical inference if the duration data are subject to left-truncation. Such inference with...

This paper investigates the determinants of German long-term unemployment. In particular a microeconometric event history analysis will be carried out to examine what impact personal characteristics such as age, gender, education, etc. or factors such as receiving unemployment benefits have on...

This paper defines economic slumps as sequences of structural breaks exhibiting a specific pattern. We identify 58 such episodes between 1950 and 2008 among 138 countries, and then examine the phases of decline and their duration. In some countries declines last extremely long, and we put...

This paper builds on the Empirical Monte Carlo simulation approach developed by Huber et al. (2013) to study the estimation of Timing-of-Events (ToE) models. We exploit rich Swedish data of unemployed job-seekers with information on participation in a training program to simulate placebo...

We develop distress prediction models for non-financial small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) using a dataset from eight European countries over the period 2000-2009. We examine idiosyncratic and systematic covariates and find that macro conditions and bankruptcy codes add predictive power...