A structural model of entry and taxation is presented to explain the changes in market structure resulting from the 1869 stamped paper tax reform act that abolished taxation on paper used for advertising and publishing news in the Netherlands. Data on when and where the newspapers existed and...

We remedy several deficiencies in the recent literature on job loss while modernizing the very early job-displacement literature. After constructing a structural model of two-sided learning between a firm and its workers, we estimate it using personnel data from Fokker Aircraft in the...

We study the self-employed decision and its relation to human and social capital. Human capital is necessary to acquire skills. Social capital dampens the effects of uncertainty about future income. Our data set consists of 1339 respondents from the same age group, who were interviewed three...

This paper measures the value of functional capacity improvement from electronic pain treatment among a sample of Dutch workers with peripheral nerve injuries. Randomized clinical trial data and individual medical records from injured workers are compared with administrative data of healthy...

This paper develops a theoretical model of a worker's decision problem under uncertainty about the optimal separation time, when holding a representative outside offer but facing fixed costs of quitting. Implications of the model's closed form solution are consistent with the quit behavior of...

Optimal layoff rules in closed form are derived for all workers in a firm that downsizes under uncertainty and faces heterogeneous firing costs. The theoretical model predicts that the firm displaces workers with low firing costs, low expected future productivity growth, and low layoff option...