Since the mid-1960's the Netherlands has had an immigration surplus, mainly because of manpower recruitment from Turkey and Morocco and immigration from the former Dutch colony of Surinam.Immigrants have a weak labor market position, which is related to their educational level and language...

Slovakia is one of the Central European countries in transformation from a centralised command system to a decentralised market economy. Along with the transition of the economy came unemployment. Other than before workers who lost their job did not find a new job immediately. This paper studies...

This paper analyzes the determinants of lay-offs, job-to-job movements and total separations with a unique data set that combines information on individual firms and their workers. We are in particular interested in whether the lay-off policy of firms can explain the relatively high level of...

In this paper, we analyze how the share of immigrant children in the classroom affects the educational attainment of native Dutch children. Our analysis uses data from various sources, which allow us to characterize educational attainment in terms of reading literacy, mathematical skills and...

December 1, 1996 Portugal introduced a new law on working hours which gradually reduced the standard workweek from 44 hours to 40 hours. We study how this mandatory working hours reduction affected employment and earnings of workers involved. We find for workers who were affected by the new law...

This paper uses a dataset collected among inhabitants of Amsterdam, to study whether wages of prime age male workers are affected by the use of cannabis and cocaine.The analysis shows that cocaine use and infrequent cannabis use do not affect wages.Frequent cannabis use has a negative wage...

In empirical studies of sequential auctions of identical objects prices have been found to decline.We study auctions of ancient Chinese porcelain recovered from shipwrecks.In these auctions there are very long sequences of lots of identical objects.We find that the average price decline is...

Abstract Unemployment insurance recipients in the Netherlands were for a long time exempted from the requirement to actively search for a job when they reached the age of 57.5. We study how this exemption affected the job finding rates of the recipients involved. We find evidence that the job...