For most workers, access to suitable employment is severely restricted by the fact that they look for jobs in the regional labor market rather than the global one. In this paper we analyze how macrolevel opportunities (regional market characteristics) and microlevel restrictions (the extent to which job searchers are restricted to the regional market) can help to explain the phenomenon of overe...

A Selection-Based Theory of the Transition from Employment to Entrepreneurship: The Role of Employer Size A simple occupational choice model is used to predict that entrepreneurs who found new firms are more likely to work for small than for large firms prior to start-up. The mechanism underlying the result is heterogeneous risk aversion. The model also predicts a positive association between n...

Disability and Multi-State Labour Force Choices with State Dependence I use a dynamic mixed multinomial logit model with unobserved heterogeneity to study the impact of work limiting disabilities on disaggregated labour choices. The first seven waves of the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey are used to investigate this relationship. Findings point out to strong state depe...

Workers who become work-incapacitated may try to change employer or stay with their current employer in an accommodated job. We study the effect of these strategies on sick-listed workers’ employment durations. We use survey and register data of 809 workers. We simultaneously estimate the duration until returning to work and the duration of employment using the timing-of-event approach. We find...

Preferences over jobs depend on wages and non-wage aspects. Variation in wealth may change the importance of income as a motivation for working. Higher wealth levels may make good non-wage characteristics relatively more important. This hypothesis is tested empirically using a reduced form search model in which differential job leaving rates identify willingness to pay for non-wage aspects of j...

Wage Effects of On-the-Job Training: A Meta-Analysis A meta-analysis is used to study the average wage effects of on-the-job training. This study shows that the average reported wage effect of on-the-job training, corrected for publication bias, is 2.6 per cent per course. The analyses reveal a substantial heterogeneity between training courses, while wage effects reported in studies based on i...

Even though decision-making in small teams is pervasive in business and in private life, little is known about subjects’ preferences with respect to individual and team decision-making and about the consequences of respecting these preferences. We report the results from an experimental beauty-contest game, where subjects could endogenously choose their preferred way of decision-making. About 6...

Causal Returns to Schooling and Individual Heterogeneity E-mail: In this paper, human capital investments are evaluated by assuming heterogeneous returns to schooling. We use the potential outcome approach to measure the causal effect of human capital investments on earnings as a continuous treatment effect. Empirical evidence is based on a sample of West German full-time employed males (BIBB/I...

In the last decade, there are strong indications of an expansion in shadow economic activities in the Netherlands Antilles, which is caused by the high tax burden and high unemployment. This paper attempts to measure the size of the shadow economy of the Netherlands Antilles using two distinct estimation methods: the direct and indirect approach. Both methods produced similar results, showing t...

I study the impact of idiosyncratic risk on savings and employment in a small open economy populated by two-member families. Families incur a fixed cost of participation when both members are employed. Because of market incompleteness and information asymmetries, this cost coupled with labor market frictions can generate multiple equilibria. In particular, there might be one equilibrium with hi...