In accordance with the needs and preferences of both employers and employees, labor markets in Western countries became increasingly flexible. However, for workers such flexibility bears the risk of long-term exclusion. This paper deals with unequal exclusionary risks on contemporary labor markets, particularly for those who are inactive and have unfavorable endowments. The data used to reveal ...

Innovation and the Determinants of Firm Survival * While many firms compete through the development of new technologies and products, it is well known that new-to-the-world innovation is inherently risky and therefore may increase the probability of firm death. However, many existing studies consistently find a negative association between innovative activity and firm death. We argue that this ...

Instrumental Variable Estimation of Treatment Effects for Duration Outcomes In this article we propose and implement an instrumental variable estimation procedure to obtain treatment effects on duration outcomes. The method can handle the typical complications that arise with duration data of time-varying treatment and censoring. The treatment effect we define is in terms of shifting the quanti...

The Effects of Reducing the Entitlement Period to Unemployment Insurance Benefits This paper exploits a substantial reform of the Dutch UI law to study the effect of the entitlement period on job finding and subsequent labor market outcomes. Using detailed administrative data covering the full population we find that reducing the entitlement period increases the job finding rate, but decreases ...

The behavioural response with respect to actuarial adjustments in the German public pension system is analysed. The introduction of actuarial adjustments serves as a source of exogenous variation to estimate discrete time transition rates into retirement. The analysis is conducted on administrative data from social security records and on survey data in a comparative scenario. Probability mass ...

Modelling the Time on Unemployment Insurance Benefits A duration model based on the time on Unemployment Insurance (UI) benefits instead of a model based on the time till re-employment is more relevant from a cost-benefit perspective. The contribution of this paper is to extend the standard (mixed) Proportional Hazard model to account for an upper bound on the duration. We use a modified mover-...

Always Poor or Never Poor and Nothing in Between? Duration of Child Poverty in Germany This paper analyses the duration of child poverty in Germany. In our sample, we observe the entire income history from the individuals' birth to their coming of age at age 18. Therefore we are able to analyze dynamics in and out of poverty for the entire population of children, whether they become poor at lea...

We apply various re nements of survival regression to assess the results of some basic speci cations based on product life cycle theory for the case of a data set of the German automobile industry. The methods applied pay attention to biases in the coe cient estimates and the standard errors, the discrete nature of the duration data and the presence of unobserved heterogeneity. Robust estimatio...

Dynamic Treatment Assignment – The Consequences for Evaluations Using Observational Data This paper discusses the evaluation problem using observational data when the timing of treatment is an outcome of a stochastic process. We show that the duration framework in discrete time provides a fertile ground for effect evaluations. We suggest easy-to-use nonparametric survival function matching esti...

We propose new specifications that explicitly account for information noise in the input data of bankruptcy hazard models. The specifications are motivated by a theory of modeling credit risk with incomplete information (Duffie and Lando [2001]). Based on over 2 million firm-months of data during 1979-2012, we demonstrate that our proposed specifications significantly improve both insample mode...