This paper evaluates a job search assistance program for unemployment insurance recipients. The assignment to the program is dynamic. We provide a discussion on dynamic treatment effects and identification conditions. In the empirical analyses we use administrative data from a unique...

This paper studies the effects of introducing legal street prostitution zones on both registered and perceived crime. We exploit a unique setting in the Netherlands where legal street prostitution zones were opened in nine cities under different regulation systems. We provide evidence that the...

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 exploits a substantial reform of the Dutch UI law to study the effect of the entitlement period on job finding and subsequent labor market outcomes. Using detailed administrative data covering the full population we find that reducing the entitlement period increases the job finding...

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...

This overview describes the development of methods for empirical research in the field of labor economics during the past four decades. This period is characterized by the use of micro data to answer policy relevant research question. Prominent in the literature is the search for exogenous...

Among OECD countries, the Netherlands has average female labor force participation, but by far the highest rate of part-time work. This paper investigates the extent to which married women respond to financial incentives. We exploit the exogenous variation caused by a substantial Dutch tax...

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 investigates how in addition to personal characteristics the neighborhood affects the individual transition rate from welfare to work. We use a unique administrative database on welfare recipients in Rotterdam, the second largest city of The Netherlands. We find that the exit rate to...

We combine micro and macro unemployment duration data to study the effects of the business cycle on the outflow from unemployment. We allow the cycle to affect individual exit probabilities of unemployed workers as well as the composition of the total inflow into unemployment. We estimate the...