Recent research on cognitive biases in decision making suggests that over-optimism critically influences entrepreneurs' decisions to establish and sustain new firms. This paper looks at entrepreneurs' over-optimism during the early life course of the firm, in order to uncover the dynamics and persistence of over-optimism. We use a representative sample of start-ups in the Netherlands, which we divide into solo selfemployed and employer firms. We find that while there is a persistence of overoptimism for the solo self-employed, namely initial over-optimist are more likely to be overoptimistic in subsequent periods; this is not the case for the employer firms.
Background The Dutch national breast cancer screening program invites women aged 50–75 for screening. By detecting the disease in an early phase, the program aims to achieve lower breast cancer mortality and improve breast cancer survivors’ health. Arguably, the latter also improves the employability of diagnosed women. Objective This study investigates the effects of the Dutch national breast cancer screening program on diagnosed women’s employment and income. Methods The empirical analysis uses data of 229,357 women aged 40–59, of whom 10,515 were diagnosed with breast cancer at an age in the range 47–53. A regression-based difference-in-differences estimator is used to identify program effects by comparing outcomes for women diagnosed at ages 47–49 with the outcomes for those diagnosed at ages 50–53. The empirical models account for individual fixed effects, and for age and year fixed effects by using a control group of women who were not diagnosed with breast cancer. Results Women’s employment rates declined in the six-year period after a breast cancer diagnosis with, on average, about 3 percentage points and their incomes declined with, on average, about 5% over this period. The empirical evidence, based on a comparison of outcomes for women diagnosed at ages 47–49 with the outcomes for those diagnosed at ages 50–53 when covered by the breast cancer screening program, does not support that these declines in employment and income were affected by the program. The evidence also does not support short or medium-term survival gains of the program. Conclusions The findings of this study suggest that the Dutch national breast cancer screening program yields no discernible short or medium-term employment and income gains for women diagnosed with breast cancer.
An adverse health event can affect women's work capacity as they need time to recover. The institutional framework in the Netherlands provides employment protection during the first two years after the diagnosis. In this study, we have assessed the extent to which women's employment is affected in the short-and long term by an adverse health event. We have used administrative Dutch data which follow women aged 25 to 55 years for four years after a medical diagnosis. We found that diagnosed women start leaving employment during the protection period and four years later they were about one percentage point less likely to be employed. Women in permanent employment did not reduce their employment during the protection period and reduced their employment with less than 0.5 percentage points thereafter. Furthermore, we found minor adjustments in the working hours in the short term and no adjustments in the long term. Lastly, we found that for wages, and not for employment and hours, adjustments could be related to the severity of the health condition: women diagnosed with temporary health conditions experienced a shortterm wage penalty of about 0.5À1.7 percent and those diagnosed with chronic and incapacitating conditions experienced a long-term wage
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