This paper reviews the recent literature on measuring and boosting cognitive and non-cognitive skills. The literature establishes that achievement tests do not adequately capture character skills: personality traits, goals, motivations, and preferences that are valued in the labor market, in...

This research investigates to what extent subjective teacher assessment of children's ability adds to the use of test scores in the explanation of children's outcomes in the transition from elementary to secondary school in terms of initial track allocation, track switching in the first three...

In elementary school, girls typically outperform boys in languages and boys typically outperform girls in math. The determinants of these differences have remained largely unexplored. Using rich data from Dutch elementary schools, we decompose the differences in achievement into gender...

The Dutch labour market is the European leader in part-time employment. Both for men and women the incidence of part-time work is higher than in most other European countries. However, this does not imply that traditional employment – i.e. full-time jobs – have disappeared in the...

Several studies document the fact that low-educated workers participate less often in further training than high-educated workers. The economic literature suggests that there is no significant difference in employer willingness to train low-educated workers, which leaves the question of why the...