The aim of this paper is to empirically analyse the responses by general practitioners to promotional activities for pharmaceuticals by pharmaceutical companies. Promotion can be beneficial for society as a means of providing information, but it can also be harmful in the sense that it lowers...

In Lisbon, the European Union has set itself the goal to become the most competitive economy in the world in 2010 without harming social cohesion and the environment. The motivation for introducing this target is the substantially higher GDP per capita of US citizens. The difference in income...

International negotiations on the liberalisation of service trade are concentrated at non-tariff barriers (NTBs). National government measures form important obstacles for service providers when they want to access foreign markets. International studies predict substantial welfare benefits...

In the Dutch economic policy debate, wage moderation is widely considered as a key factor for achieving economic growth and low unemployment. However, some economists criticise the policy emphasis on wage moderation, claiming that high wages are needed to maintain structural labour productivity...

In 1982, duration of university education in the Netherlands decreased from five to four years. This institutional reform is exploited for estimating the causal effect of one year of university education on wages in 1997. Wages of employees who enrolled just before or after the reform are...

Since 1990, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis (CPB) has used a leading indicator in preparing short-term forecasts for the Dutch economy. This paper describes some recent methodological innovations as well as the current structure and empirical results of the revised CPB...

This paper explains bilateral services trade using a gravity equation and compares the results with trade in goods. We analyse bilateral trade between the provinces of Canada and between the member states of the European Union. We conclude that the gravity equation explains the variability in...

We study the evolution of wage inequality between skilled and unskilled workers in the Netherlands for the years 1969-2020. Our analysis is based on estimates of the production structure in the Netherlands, projections of the relative supply of skilled workers, and projections regarding shifts...

We analyse empirically price-setting in the Dutch mortgage market, using information on about 124,000 Dutch households and 54 mortgage lenders over the years 1996-2001. For a narrowly defined set of mortgages (which have a fixed lending rate for ten years), the range of the lending rate...

Transaction costs have attracted considerable attention in the theoretical literature on residential mobility. In many European countries, these costs mainly consist of ad-valorem transaction costs. In the current paper, we demonstrate empirically for the Netherlands that the transaction costs...