The Role of Sickness in the Evaluation of Job Search Assistance and Sanctions* Unemployment insurance agencies may combat moral hazard by punishing refusals to apply to assigned vacancies. However, the possibility to report sick creates an additional moral hazard, since during sickness spells, minimum requirements on search behavior do not apply. This reduces the ex ante threat of sanctions. We...

Credit migration matrices are cardinal inputs to many risk management applications; their accurate estimation is therefore critical. We explore two approaches: cohort and two variants of duration – one imposing, the other relaxing time homogeneity – and the resulting differences, both statistically through matrix norms and economically using a credit portfolio model. We propose a new metric for...

HcRNAV is a small icosahedral virus that infects the shellfish-killing marine dinoflagellate Heterocapsa circularisquama, which harbors a dicistronic linear single-stranded RNA (ssRNA) genome ca. 4.4 kb in length. Its major capsid protein (MCP) gene sequence is not expressed by various strains of Escherichia coli, possibly because of a codon usage problem. To solve this problem, a chemically mo...

Long-term Effects of Famine on Life Expectancy: A Re-analysis of the Great Finnish Famine of 1866-1868 Famines are extreme cases of environmental stress, and have been used by a series of studies to explore the long-term consequences of the fetal or childhood environment. Results are inconsistent and do not support negative long-term effects on mortality. The authors test the hypothesis that se...

Monitoring Job Offer Decisions, Punishments, Exit to Work, and Job Quality Unemployment insurance systems include monitoring of unemployed workers and punitive sanctions if job search requirements are violated. We analyze the effect of sanctions on the ensuing job quality, notably on wage rates and hours worked, and we examine how often a sanction leads to a lower occupational level. The data c...

The Health Returns to Education: What Can We Learn from Twins? This paper estimates the health returns to education, using data on identical twins. I adopt a twin-differences strategy in order to obtain estimates that are not biased by unobserved family background and genetic traits that may affect both education and health. I further investigate to what extent within-twin-pair differences in s...

This paper investigates the extent to which cleanup durations at Superfund sites reflect demographic biases incongruent with the principles of Environmental Justice. We argue that the duration of cleanup, conditional on a large number of site characteristics, should be independent of the race and income profile of the neighborhood in which the site is located. Since the demographic composition ...

Achieving sufficient yields of proteins in their functional form represents the first bottleneck in contemporary bioscience and biotechnology. To accomplish successful overexpression of membrane proteins in a workhorse organism such as E. coli, defined and rational optimization strategies based on an understanding of the genetic background of the toxicity-escape mechanism are desirable. To this...

Job mobility and employment durations can be explained by different theoretical approaches, such as job matching or human capital theory or dual labor market approaches. These models may, however, apply to different degrees at different durations in the employment spell. Standard empirical techniques, such as hazard rate analysis, cannot deal with this problem. In this paper, we apply censored ...

Aiming to explore how the survival of trade flows has evolved over time, we analyze a rich data set of detailed imports to individual EU15 countries from 140 non-EU exporters, covering the period 1962-2006. We find that short duration is a persistent characteristic of trade throughout the extended time period that we study: in general only 40 percent of trade flows survive the first year of ser...