Preferences and attitudes to illicit drug policy held by individuals are likely to be an important influence in the development of illicit drug policy. Amongst the key factors impacting on an individuals preferences over substance use policy are their beliefs about the costs and benefits of drug...

Cannabis is the most popular illegal drug. Its legal status is typically justified on the grounds that cannabis use has harmful consequences. Empirically investigating this issue has been a fertile topic for research in recent times. We provide an overview of this literature, focusing on studies...

Previous empirical studies on the effect of age on productivity and wages find contradicting results. Some studies find that if workers grow older there is an increasing gap between productivity and wages, i.e. wages increase with age while productivity does not or does not increase at the same...

We study how changes in the maximum benefit duration affect the inflow into unemployment in the Netherlands. Until August 2003, workers who became unemployed after age 57.5 were entitled to unemployment benefits until the age of 65, after which they would receive old age pensions. This...

This paper provides a comprehensive evaluation of benefit sanctions, i.e. temporary reductions in unemployment benefits as punishment for noncompliance with eligibility requirements. In addition to the effects on unemployment durations, we evaluate the effects on post-unemployment employment...

For various reasons the relationship between age and productivity is a matter of policy concern. I present new empirical research showing how productivity is affected by age. I study age effects at the individual level by analyzing data on running and publishing in economic journals. Furthermore...

In an experimental setting some Danish unemployed workers were assigned to an activation program while others were not. Unemployed who were assigned to the activation program found a job more quickly. We show that the activation effect increases with the distance between the place of residence...

This paper investigates how winning a substantial lottery prize affects labor supply. Analyzing data from Dutch State Lottery winners, we find that earnings are affected but not employment. Lottery prize winners reduce their hours of work but they are not very likely to withdraw from the labor...

If two partners smoke, their quit behavior may be related through correlation in unobserved individual characteristics and common external shocks. However, there may also be a causal effect whereby the quit behavior of one partner is affected by the quit decision of the other partner. We use...

Our paper revisits Okun's relationship between observed unemployment rates and output gaps. We include in the relationship the effect of labour market institutions as well as age and gender e ects. Our empirical analysis is based on 20 OECD countries over the period 1985-2013. We find that the...