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.The wages of...

This paper uses a dataset collected among inhabitants of Amsterdam, to study the employment effects of the use of cannabis and cocaine.For females no negative effects of drug use on the employment rate are found.For males there is a negative correlation between past cannabis and cocaine use and...

This paper investigates how the potential duration of unemployment benefits affects the quality of post-unemployment jobs.It takes advantage of a natural experiment introduced by a change in Slovenia's unemployment insurance law that substantially reduced the potential benefit duration.Although...

We introduce a new measure of competition: the elasticity of a firm’s profits with respect to its cost level. A higher value of this profit elasticity (PE) signals more intense competi- tion. Using firm-level data we compare PE with the most popular competition measures such as the price cost...

Recent evaluations of active labor market policies are not very optimistic about their effectiveness to bring unemployed back to work.An important reason is that unemployed get locked-in, that is they reduce their effort to find a regular job.This paper uses an administrative dataset from the...

This paper investigates the reading of fiction books by 15-year-olds in 18 OECD countries.It appears that girls fiction books more often than boys, whereas boys read comic books more often than girls.The intensity by which children read fiction books is influenced by parental education, family...

This paper investigates the disincentive effects of the potential duration of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits.The disincentive effects are identified by exploiting changes in the UI system in Slovenia, which involved substantial reductions in the potential benefit duration and had...

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...

Employment protection is often related to costs incurred by the firms when they hire a worker.The stability of the employment relationship, enhanced by employment protection, is also favorable to the productivity of the job.We analyze employment protection focusing on this trade-off between...