This paper investigates the effectiveness of an intervention that was targeted at a specific group of Dutch Social Assistance (SA) recipients with debt problems. With a large share of the income gains of work resumption were transferred to the creditors, these individuals experienced a strong a...

This paper investigates the effectiveness of a monthly lottery in reducing sick leave among workers in a manufacturing firm. Conditions of participation are not having reported sick in the previous three months and not having won the lottery earlier. It turns out that the lottery results in a...

This paper investigates the effects of application processing times on welfare applicants' benefit and employment outcomes. For causal inference, we exploit exogenous variation in application processing times stemming from the random assignment of caseworkers. Our findings indicate that longer...

This paper analyses the effect of education on starting and quitting smoking, using longitudinal data of Australian twins. The endogeneity of education, censoring of smoking durations and the timing of starting smoking versus that of completion of education are taken into account by the flexible...

In a growing number of countries, the delivery of social welfare services is contracted out to private providers, and increasingly, using performance-based contracts. Critics of performance-based incentive contracts stress their potential unintended effects, including cream-skimming and other...

This paper studies a conditional block grant that Dutch municipalities receive for welfare-to-work programs. Many municipalities do not fully use this grant, although programs are beneficial for them. We argue that municipalities incur expenses to use the grant. If these costs are substantial,...

This paper analyzes whether information on high school quality published by a national newspaper affects school choice in the Netherlands. For this purpose, we use both school level and individual student level data. First, we study the causal effect of quality scores on the influx of new high...

This paper estimates the longer-term effects of childhood conduct disorder on human capital accumulation and violent and criminal behaviour later in life using data of Australian twins. We measure conduct disorder with a rich set of indicators based on diagnostic criteria from psychiatry. Using...

This paper analyzes the response of secondary schools to changes in their quality ratings. The current analysis is the first to address the impact of quality scores that have been published by a newspaper (Trouw), rather than public interventions. Our research design exploits the substantial...

This paper analyzes selection and incentive effects of opting out from public to private insurance on employer Disability Insurance (DI) inflow rates. We use administrative information on DI benefit costs and opting-out decisions of a balanced panel of about 140,000 employers that are observed...