The apprenticeship system is the most important source of formal post-secondary training in Germany. Our paper contributes to the ongoing debate as to why firms are willing to invest in such training even though many apprentices will leave the training firm soon after completion of the...

We consider a dependent competing risks model with many risks and many covariates. We show identifiability of the marginal distributions of latent variables for a given dependence structure. Instead of directly estimating these distributions, we suggest a plug-in regression framework for the...

It is well known that the competing risks model is identified if the dependence structure between risks (the copula function) is known or assumed. Special cases include independence of risks or independent censoring. If the copula function is not specified, parameters of interest are only set...

Despite a surge in the research efforts put into modelling credit risk during the past decade, few studies have incorporated the impact that macroeconomic conditions have on business defaults. In this paper, we estimate a duration model to explain the survival time to default for borrowers in...

We consider the problem of assessing the effects of a treatment on duration outcomes using data from a randomized evaluation with noncompliance. For such settings, we derive nonparametric sharp bounds for average and quantile treatment effects addressing three pervasive problems simultaneously:...

Between one and two million migrants reside in cramped conditions in Nairobi's slums without proper access to sanitation or affordable clean water. Children in such areas are exposed to enormous risks, health risks in particular. Using longitudinal data collected every four months during the...

We study accelerated failure time models in which the survivor function of the error term is log-concave. The log-concavity assumption is often implied by the underlying economic models and covers large families of commonly used distributions. For right-censored failure time data, we construct...

The primary reasons for credit card charge-off are delinquency and bankruptcy. In this paper, we develop a dependent competing risks model to investigate the determinants of time to delinquency and time to bankruptcy jointly, and to investigate their interdependence. Our results show that...

Given functional data from a survival process with time-dependent covariates, we derive a smooth convex representation for its nonparametric log-likelihood functional and obtain its functional gradient. From this we devise a generic gradient boosting procedure for estimating the hazard function...

The effective number of political parties (ENP) in a single member plurality rule electoral system is analyzed as a dynamic process whereby the tournament nature of the election contest induces excessive entry and sunk entry costs promote persistence even as Duverger-Demsetz type political...