We survey the recent literature on the effects of active labor market policies on individual labor market outcomes like employment and income, for adult female individuals without work in European countries. We consider skilltraining programs, monitoring and sanctions, job search assistance, and...

We study food Engel curves among the poor population targeted by a conditional cash transfer programme in Colombia. After controlling for the endogeneity of total expenditure and for the (unobserved) variability of prices across villages, the best fit is provided by a log-linear specification....

Policy makers in Europe have been concerned that lack of product market competition have led productivity to lag behind the US. Theoretical models are ambiguous about the direction of the effect that product market competition should have on productivity. On the one hand increasing competition...

This paper examines the empirical analysis of treatment effects on duration outcomes from data that contain instrumental variation. We focus on social experiments in which an intention to treat is randomized and compliance may be imperfect. We distinguish between cases where the treatment starts...

The paper evaluates the differential performance of the six main types of Swedish programmes that were available to adult unemployed workers en Titled to unemployment benefits in the 1990s: labour market training, workplace introduction, work experience placement, relief work, trainee...

Heterogeneity is likely to be an important determinant of the shape of optimal tax schemes. This article addresses the issue in a model à la Mirrlees with a continuum of agents. The agents differ in their productivities and opportunity costs of work, but their labor supplies depend only on a...

The paper examines social security (public pension) reforms in which the programme is partially shifted from a public unfunded basis to a private, prefunded, basis. It focuses on reforms where individuals have a choice in switching from public funded to private unfunded programmes (as in the...

This paper make straightforward extensions to Anderson's (1996) nonparametric statistical tests of stochastic dominance criteria to bivariate distributions. These test are applied to a time series of cross-section datasets on household level total expenditure and non labour market time in the UK.

We present a model of endogenous Ųm growth with R&D investment and stochastic innovation as the engines of growth. The model for Ųm growth is a partial equilibrium model drawing on the quality ladder models in the macro growth literature, but also on the literature on patent races and the...

We examine the impact of high school graduation on the probability individuals from welfare backgrounds use welfare themselves. Our data consists of administrative educational records for grade 12 students in a Canadian province linked with their own and their parents' welfare records. We...