This research shows that social capital is important in explaining why crime is so heterogeneous across Dutch municipalities. Social capital is considered as a latent construct composed of a variety of indicators, such as blood donations, voter turnout, voluntary contributions to community...

Should one calculate user benefits from changes in door-to-door journeys or from changes in the use of separate links of the network? Quite often, the second approach is deemed wrong, as consumers are supposed to demand journeys, not parts of journeys. However, we show that for a quite general...

In labour markets with collective wage bargaining, progressivity of the labour income tax creates a trade-off that allows the degree of progressivity to be determined optimally. On the one hand, wages are lowered and unemployment decreases, on the other hand, the individual labour supply...

The Great Recession has caused unemployment in the Netherlands to rise from 3.1% in 2008 to over 7% at the beginning of 2014. Structural imbalances caused by labour mismatch could be one of the explanations underlying this high rate. The goal of this paper is to examine this hypothesis. We...

This paper investigates the question whether crime reduces investment in human capital or whether education reduces criminal activity by using fixed effect estimation on data of Australian twins. The study takes genetic and socio-economic factors shared by the twins into account. We find that...

We analyze long-run scenarios for the European natural gas markets in a model, NATGAS, that explicitly includes both resource constraints and producers’ market power. Europa wordt geconfronteerd met afnemende eigen aardgasvoorraden, met name in de van oudsher grote producenten het Verenigd...

In GRAVITY WITH GRAVITAS: A SOLUTION TO THE BORDER PUZZLE, Anderson and Van Wincoop (2003) estimate what trade between US states and Canadian provinces would have been if the border between Canada and the United States had not existed. They showed that computing the border effect requires...

We reassess the empirical relevance of the Kuznets Curve with a new inequality dataset. Using panel data estimations that account for the heterogeneity of inequality observations, we test for both the unconditional and the conditional hypothesis that includes alternative inequality determinants....

We construct a model for differentiated Cournot competition between service-based and infrastructure-based firms, out of which one infrastructure-based firm (the incumbent) supplies to the service-based firms. We seek for and compare the socially optimal and the incumbent’s profit maximizing...