This study provides an overview of the policy of liberalisation that transformed the Dutch notary profession into one of the least regulated in Europe. We discuss the changes brought with the new Notary Act of 1999, the political debates and lobbying preceding the introduction of the Act, and...

In 2003, the government will enter into performance contracts with each of the 25 regional police forces. The performance contracts establish a direct link between meeting a number of quantitative performance targets and financial incentives. A major improvement in police performance is...

Early school-leaving is considered to be one of the major problems in Dutch education. In order to reduce the number of dropouts in the school year 2006-2007 the Dutch government has offered a financial incentive scheme to 14 out of 39 regions. This scheme provides a reward of 2000 euro per...

To answer policy questions that have intergenerational implications, a computable simulation model should obey four conditions, it should: incorporate long-term demographic developments; include a detailed modelling of the public sector; decompose the population into several generations; account...

This document provides a review of recent theoretical and empirical literature on the relationship between entry, exit and productivity. Decomposition methods show that entry and exit considerably contribute to productivity growth, but are unable to shed any light on the ultimate sources of...

This paper examines the impact of early tracking on enrollment in and completion of higher education. We compare pupils that are directly tracked in lower general secondary education (‘mavo’) to pupils that postpone their choice of education level by entering secondary education in...

In light of the ageing of the Dutch society, policy measures aim at increasing the participation rate of elderly workers, particularly in the age-group between 55 and 64. This paper develops a stylized numerical simulation model. This model describes consumption, savings and labour supply...

This study analyzes under which circumstances it may be desirable for the government to stimulate open source software as a response to market failures in software markets. To consider whether policy intervention can increase dynamic efficiency, we discuss the differences between proprietary...

This study presents four long-term scenarios for the public sector and health care in the Netherlands. In the two scenarios that stress the importance of collective provisions (Regional Communities and Strong Europe), the share of government production (public administration, defense and...

We explore the economic implications of the possible accession of Croatia to the European Union. We focus on two main changes associated with the EU-membership: accession to the internal European Market and institutional reforms in Croatia triggered by the EU-membership. Consumption per capita...