Taking into account inter-dependence within the family, we investigate the relationship between part-time work and happiness. We use panel data from the new Household, Income and Labor Dynamics in Australia Survey. Our analysis indicates that part-time women are more satisfied with working hours...

This paper investigates how a mandatory activation program in Denmark affects the job finding rate of unemployed workers. The activation program was introduced in an experimental setting where about half of the workers who became unemployed in the period from November 2005 to March 2006 were...

We evaluate the effect of active labour market programs on the duration of unemployment in a reward or punish system. In Switzerland, unemployment benefits are conditional upon program attendance after 7 months of unemployment duration. In the evaluation we allow for selectivity affecting the...

This Paper studies the wage effects of the use of alcohol and tobacco. The analysis based on a recent survey in the Netherlands shows that for males the use of tobacco has a negative wage effect of about 10% while the use of alcohol has a positive wage effect of about the same size. Smoking and...

This Paper is on the early labour market experiences of second-generation immigrants in the Netherlands. We find that for employment rates only are there differences across ethnic groups. Conditional on having a job, there is hardly any difference in wages and other job characteristics between...

This Paper investigates the effectiveness of benefit sanctions in reducing unemployment duration. Data from the Swiss labour market allow making a distinction between the effect of a warning that a person is not complying with eligibility requirements and the effect of the actual enforcement of...

This paper investigates how in addition to personal characteristics the neighbourhood affects the individual transition rate from welfare to work. We use a unique administrative database on welfare recipients in Rotterdam, the second largest city of The Netherlands. We find that the exit rate to...

This paper investigates whether on-the-job training has an effect on the employability of workers. Using data from the Netherlands we disentangle the true effect of training incidence from the spurious one determined by unobserved individual heterogeneity. We also take into account that there...

The Great Recession is characterized by a GDP-decline that was unprecedented in the past decades. This paper discusses the implications of the Great Recession analyzing labor market data from 20 OECD countries. Comparing the Great Recession with the 1980s recession it is concluded that there is...

This paper studies how changes in the two key parameters of unemployment insurance – the benefit replacement rate (RR) and the potential duration of benefits (PBD) – affect the duration of unemployment. In 1989, the Austrian government made unemployment insurance more generous by changing,...