Sickness Absence and Local Benefit Cultures In many countries, sickness absence financed by generous insurance benefits has become an important concern in the policy debate. It turns out that there are strong variations in absence behavior between local geographical areas, and it has been difficult to explain these variations by observable socioeconomic factors. In this paper we investigate whe...

No Pass No Drive: Education and Allocation of Time Do negative incentives or sticks in education improve student outcomes? Since the late 1980s, several U.S. states have introduced No Pass No Drive (NPND) laws that set minimum academic requirements for teenagers to obtain driving licenses. Using data from the American Community Survey (ACS) and Monitoring the Future (MTF), we exploit variation ...

The presence of L-rhamnose (Rha) branches in the coaggregation receptor polysaccharides (RPS) of Streptococcus gordonii 38 and Streptococcus oralis J22 was eliminated by replacement of wefB with ermAM in these strains. The expression of this gene in S. oralis 34 did not, however, result in the addition of Rha branches to the linear RPS of this strain, which is identical to that produced by the ...

Time for Children: Trends in the Employment Patterns of Parents, 1967-2009 Utilizing data from the 1967-2009 years of the March Current Population Surveys, we examine two important resources for children’s well-being: time and money. We document trends in parental employment, from the perspective of children, and show what underlies these trends. We find that increases in family work hours main...

By using panel data, this study examines the effect of unemployment on various types of individual health-related behavior, namely physical exercise, dietary habits, smoking, drinking, and sleep duration among Japanese men aged 20 –40 years. The results indicate that the effect of unemployment on health-related behavior varies. It is found that exercise habits and sleep duration are affected by...

We examine motivations for prosocial behavior using new data on volunteer firefighters that contain a dictator-game based measure of altruism, surveyed measures of other behavioral factors, and call records that provide an objective measure of time spent volunteering. Controlling for a variety of other explanations, we find that the decision to volunteer is positively correlated with altruism a...

Estimating Labor Supply Responses and Welfare Participation: Using a Natural Experiment to Validate a Structural Labor Supply Model In this paper, we formulate and estimate an economic model of labor supply and welfare participation. The model is estimated on data on single men from Quebec drawn from the 1986 Canadian Census. Budget sets for each work-welfare combination – accounting for income...

The incidence and duration of work absence spells for a sample of Swedish blue collar workers in 1991 are analyzed using the KaplanMeier estimator, discrete time hazard regression as well as strati ed Cox regression. The main interest is directed towards the e ect of economic incentives. The e ect of a decrease in the replacement level of the compulsory Swedish sickness insurance that took plac...

We examine equilibria in competitive insurance markets with adverse selection when wealth differences arise endogenously from unobservable savings or labor supply decisions. The endogeneity of wealth implies that high risk individuals may ceteris paribus exhibit the lower marginal willingness to pay for insurance than low risks, a phenomenon that we refer to as irregular-crossing preferences. I...

There is some controversy in the field of household economics regarding the efficiency of household decisions. We make the point that a flexible specification of spousal preferences and the household production technology precludes the possibility of using revealed preference data on household time allocations to determine the manner in which spouses interact: efficiently or inefficiently. Unde...