Recently, there has been considerable debate about a reform of the Dutch system of student support, in which grants will be (partly) replaced by loans. The discussion focuses on the effects on student enrollment decisions. Surprisingly, no study has yet analysed the effect of receiving a grant...

The Shapley value is a well-known allocation concept in cooperative game theory. It assigns to each player a part of the worth generated by the coalition of all players. The Shapley value is fair in the sense that it satisfies several desirable properties and axioms. We consider a cooperative...

This paper has two aims. First, we uncover some salient components of fixed export costs, which play a crucial role in recent heterogeneous firms models of international trade. Second, we investigate whether the importance of these fixed export costs varies with the size of a firm’s...

Should constraints on urban expansion be relaxed because of external agglomeration economies? In a system of heterogeneous cities, we demonstrate that second-best land use policy consists of a tax on city creation and a subsidy (tax) on urban development in cities in which the marginal-average...

This paper makes use of a new dataset to investigate energy intensity developments in the Netherlands over the period 1987–2005, in comparison with 18 other OECD countries. A key feature of our analysis is that we combine this cross-country perspective with a high level of sector detail,...

Should one calculate user benefits from changes in door-to-door journeys or from changes in the use of separate links of the network? The second approach is often discarded for its perceived inability to deal with new links and the OD-matrix approach is favoured. Differences arise when the set...

We use a confirmatory factor analysis to study the relation between the importance of a broad spectrum of saving motives, such as saving for retirement, and saving behavior. Survey data show that many respondents save for retirement in unconventional retirement accounts, such asinvestments in...

Flexible retirement - that is, the opportunity to choose one’s own personal retirement age - serves as a hedge against pension risk and provides insurance to workers facing health or productivity shocks. This paper discusses three conditions to provide insurance through flexible...

Intergenerational risk sharing by funded pension schemes may increase welfare in an ex ante sense. However, it also suffers from a time inconsistency problem. In particular, young generations may be unwilling to start participating in a pension scheme if this requires them to make huge transfers...