This overview describes the development of methods for empirical research in the field of labor economics during the past four decades. This period is characterized by the use of micro data to answer policy relevant research question. Prominent in the literature is the search for exogenous...

This chapter reviews the existing empirical evidence on how social insurance affects health. Social insurance encompasses programs primarily designed to insure against health risks, such as health insurance, sick leave insurance, accident insurance, long-term care insurance and disability...

This chapter is concerned with the identification and estimation of models of labor supply. The focus is on the key issues that arise from unobserved heterogeneity, nonparticipation and dynamics. We examine the simple “static” labor supply model with proportional taxes and highlight the...

The paper empirically investigates credit access and borrowing costs in Poland's rural financial market. We conduct an econometric analysis based on cross-sectional survey data including formal loans taken in the period 1997-1999. A hedonic regression of the effective interest rate, comprising...

The aim of this paper is to empirically analyse the effects of governmentally promoted credit access on the investment behaviour of credit rationed farmers. This is done by specifying an empirical investment equation which is estimated on a cross-sectional sample of Polish farm household data....

The polychoric correlation is an ML estimator for the correlation parameter between two latent variables. Each latent variable is only observed as an ordered categorical indicator. This estimator is based on an assumption on the joint distribution for the latent variables which in this case is...

This paper investigates the effects of ordinal regressors in linear regression models. Each ordered categorical variable is interpreted as a rough measurement of an underlying continuous variable as it is often done in microeconometrics for the dependent variable. It is shown that using ordinal...

With its recently announced strategy "Europe 2020", the European Union picks up two major challenges: transforming the economy into a knowledge society with innovation as the main driver of economic growth and cohering a population whose workforce is shrinking and aging. Two benchmarks of this...

We estimate labor supply when tax evasion is an option, using a discrete choice model on pooled Norwegian survey data from 1980 and 2001. Direct labor supply elasticities, conditional on sectors, are in the range of 0.2-0.4. The elasticities are higher for work that is not registered for...