Several recent papers have concluded that precautionary saving motives are needed to reconcile data on lifetime patterns of consumption and income with a standard optimising model. In this paper we contest that we necessarily need a precautionary motive and we show that if we take consumption to...

All empirical models of earnings processes in the literature assume a good deal of homogeneity. For example, all authors assume either that everyone has a unit root process or that everyone has a stationary process. In contrast to this we model earnings processes allowing for lots of...

Characteristics models have been found to be useful in many areas of economics. However, their empirical implementation tends to rely heavily on functional form assumptions. In this paper we develop a revealed preference approach to characteristics models. We derive the necessary and sufficient...

We study risk behavior of Danish self-employed entrepreneurs, whose income risk may be driven by both exogenous factors and effort choice (moral hazard). Partial insurance is available through voluntary unemployment insurance (UI). Additional incentives to sign insurance contracts stem from a...

A potential determinant of intrahousehold distribution is the birth order of children. While a number of studies have analysed birth order effects in developed countries there are still only a few dealing with developing countries. This paper develops a model of intrahousehold allocation with...

We use a rich longitudinal data set for West Germany to disentangle the wage effects for female workers around first birth. Data on daily real wages reveal a dip in women’s real wages shortly before giving birth and a drop of 10 to 20 percent after finishing maternity leave and returning to...

Among the OECD countries, Spain faces one of the highest rates of self-employment and Denmark one of the lowest, being the difference specially relevant among women. These two countries present important differences in their institutional environment and labour market conditions: the level of...

Based on unique register data of male immigrants in Denmark, we investigate whether self-employment is used as a last resort. To identify self-employment as a last resort, we define different types of immigrants as a function of transition probabilities between wage-employment, non-employment...

In this paper we compare the traditional econometric fixed effect/first difference estimator with the maximum likelihood estimator implied by covariance structure models for panel data. Our findings are that the maximum likelihood estimator is remarkable robust to mis-specifications, however in...