This paper uses information from a panel of Dutch firms to investigate the labor productivity effects of performance related pay (PRP). We find that PRP increases labor productivity at the firm level with about 9% and employment with about 5%.

There is a clear consensus that childhood experiences shape adult success, yet there is limited understanding of their impact on future generations. We proxy parental investments during childhood with birth order and study whether disadvantages due to lower investments are transmitted to future...

We provide evidence that the social norm (expectation) that adults work has a substantial detrimental causal effect on the mental well-being of unemployed men in mid-life, as substantial as, e.g., the detriment of being widowed. As their peers in age retire and the social norm weakens, the...

There is a concern that ordered responses on health questions may differ across populations or even across subgroups of a population. This reporting heterogeneity may invalidate group comparisons and measures of health inequality. This paper proposes a test for differential reporting in ordered...

Social surveys are often used to estimate unemployment duration distributions. Survey nonresponse may then cause a bias. We study this using a unique dataset that combines survey information of individual workers with administrative records of the same workers. The latter provide information on...

Major events in the life of an elderly individual, such as retirement, a significant decrease in income, death of the spouse, disability, and a move to a nursing home, may affect the mental health status of the individual. For example, the individual may enter a prolonged depression. We...

The magnitude of the effect that health has on the retirement decision has long been studied. We examine the reverse relationship, whether or not retirement has a direct impact on later-life health. In order to identify the causal relationship, we use unexpected early retirement window offers to...

This paper assesses the impact of a dramatic reform of the Dutch pension system on mental health, savings behavior and retirement expectations of workers nearing retirement age. The reform means that public sector workers born on January 1, 1950 or later face a substantial reduction in their...

This paper investigates the effects of intensified screening of disability insurance benefit applications. A large-scale experiment was setup where in 2 of the 26 Dutch regions case workers of the disability insurance administration were instructed to screen applications more intense. The...

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...