Poverty indicators often disagree about whether a person is poor or not. Yet, when it comes to assessing whether a programme is successful in reaching the poor the dominant practice is to use an income poverty indicator. This paper investigates whether the choice of welfare indicator influences...

This study assesses how child deprivation in Ontario compares to that of Ontario's population in general and that of children in eight European high-income countries (France, Germany, United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden). This research has been motivated by the...

Immigrant access to social protection in the Netherlands has changed quite markedly over time. This paper discusses the changes from an historical perspective and introduces a theoretical framework (the Welfare Pentagon) explaining how immigrants cope with (economic) hardship when they do not...

In this article we discuss the complementarity of laboratory and field data. Experiments offer highly controlled environments that allow precise testing and causal inferences. Survey and field data on the other hand provide information on large and representative samples of people interacting in...

The role of improved schooling, a central part of most development strategies, has become controversial because expansion of school attainment has not guaranteed improved economic conditions. This paper reviews the role of cognitive skills in promoting economic well-being, with a particular...

Max Weber attributed the higher economic prosperity of Protestantregions to a Protestant work ethic. We provide an alternative theory: Protestant economies prospered because instruction in reading the Biblegenerated the human capital crucial to economic prosperity. We test the theory using...

We try to identify which economic factors might be responsible for the large international differences in student performance. We present time series evidence for a number of European countries which suggests that rising educational expenditures obviously did not improve student performance....

Bidding challenges learning theories. Even with the same bid, experiences vary stochastically: the same choice can result in either a gain or a loss. In such an environment, the question arises of how the nearly universally documented phenomenon of loss aversion affects the adaptive dynamics. We...

We report the results of a field experiment evaluating the impact of financial literacy training on teenagers between 14 and 16 years in German high schools. After the training, treated teenagers exhibit a significant increase in both interest in financial matters and self-assessed knowledge...