We investigate the presence of moral hazard and advantageous or adverse selection in a market for supplementary health insurance. For this we specify and estimate dynamic models for health insurance decisions and health care utilization. Estimates of the health care utilization models indicate...

This paper investigates the impact of parental education on child health outcomes. To identify the causal effect we explore exogenous variation in parental education induced by a schooling reform in 1947, which raised the minimum school leaving age in the UK. Findings based on data from the...

We study the effect of obesity on wages and employment, using data from the British NCDS. The results show a significant negative association between obesity and labor market outcomes even after controlling for a rich set of demographic, socioeconomic, environmental and behavioral variables....

This paper focuses on the relation between the onset of disability and employment outcomes. We develop an event history model that includes unscheduled hospitalizations as a measure for unanticipated health shocks and estimate the model on data from the British National Child Development Study...

We test whether different empirical methods give different results when evaluating job-search assistance programs. Budgetary problems at the Dutch unemployment insurance (UI) administration in March 2010, caused a sharp drop in the availability of these programs. Using administrative data...

In this paper we focus on the role of caseworkers in the assignment and take-up of welfare-to-work programs. We conduct a field experiment that generates exogenous variation in the assignment to different policy regimes to caseworkers. The experiment allows us to provide evidence on the...

This paper uses administrative data from 16 cohorts of the Dutch population to study the relationship between field of study and family outcomes. We first document considerable variation by field of study for a range of family outcomes. To get to causal effects, we use admission lotteries that...

In this paper we investigate how heterogeneous agents choose among tournaments with different prizes. We show that if the number of agents is sufficiently small, multiple equilibria can arise. Depending on how the prize money is split over the tournaments, these may include, for example, a...

Randomized experiments provide policy relevant treatment effects if there are no spillovers between participants and nonparticipants. We show that this assumption is violated for a Danish activation program for unemployed workers. Using a difference-in-difference model we show that the...

This paper reports on a field experiment testing for sunk-cost effects in an education setting. Students signing up for extra-curricular tutorial sessions randomly received a discount on the tuition fee. The sunk-cost effect predicts that students who receive larger discounts will attend fewer...