This paper investigates the effect of coaching in vocational education on school dropout using data from a randomized experiment. We find that one year of coaching reduces school dropout by more than 40 percent from 17 to 10 percentage points. The reduction in school dropout results from two...

Over the period 2005-2009 the Dutch government increased childcare subsidies substantially, reducing the average effective parental fee by 50%, and extended subsidies to so-called guestparent care. We estimate the labour supply effect of this reform with a difference-in-differences strategy,...

Despite the centrality of incentives for innovation in models of economic growth, there is little systematic evidence that the value of technologies varies with market size and institutional arrangements. This paper presents micro-evidence indicating the value of patent rights for a given...

This paper discusses policy instruments for redirecting technical change within the electricity sector to mitigate climate change. First, we unravel the mechanism behind directed technical change, explaining why markets may underprovide innovations in expensive renewable technologies in...

We use a panel data set of about 1.7 million hospital records in 4,000 Dutch zip code regions for the years 2006-2009. We estimate the effect of physician fees and physician density on regional variation in hospital care for nine different treatments. Our results show that a 1 percent increase...

Mirror data are observations of bilateral variables such as trade from one country to another, reported by both countries. The efficient estimation of a bilateral variable from its mirror data, for example when compiling consistent international trade statistics, requires information about the...

This paper studies the interaction between macro-economic risk and paygo social security. For this, it uses an applied general equilibrium model with overlapping generations of risk-averse households. The sources of risk are productivity shocks and depreciation shocks. The risk profile of...

The paper tests the role of agglomeration effects on the export decision of services firms. Recent theories on trade with heterogeneous firms predict that export participation goes along with sunk market-entry costs. Only the more productive firms will be able to overcome these sunk costs....

We study optimal timing of regulated investment in a real options setting, in which the regulated monopolist has private information on investment costs. In solving the ensuing agency problem, the regulator trades off investment timing inefficiency against the dead-weight loss arising from high...