This study estimates the size and value of unpaid family caretaking activities at a European level. While at a country level several studies are available, a comprehensive evaluation for Europe as a whole was missing so far, mainly due to data limitations. This paper fills this gap using a...

Patterns of informal care are documented throughout the day with Dutch time use diary data. The diary data enable us to identify a, so far overlooked, source of opportunity costs of informal care, i.e. the necessity to perform particular tasks of informal care at specific moments of the day....

There is no robust empirical support for the effect of financial incentives on the decision to work in self-employment rather than as a wage earner. In the literature, this is seen as a puzzle. We offer a focus on the opportunity cost, i.e. the wages given up as an employee. Information on...

A substantial proportion of working age individuals in Britain are looking after sick, disabled, and elderly people and combine work and caring responsibilities. Using the British Household Panel Study (BHPS) for the years 1991 to 2002 this paper studies the determinants of labour market...

The time devoted to housework in couple households is substantial. Research on intrahousehold time allocations has generally assumed that housework is a necessary evil and that the partner with the lower opportunity cost of time in the market will devote more time to home production. In reality,...

This study investigates how elements of a survey invitation message targeted to businesses influence their participation in a self-administered web survey. We implement a full factorial experiment varying five key components of the email invitation. Unlike traditional experimental setups with...

This paper identifies several distortions which create barriers to entrepreneurship. First, in addition to the innate entry cost, there are entry costs caused by regulation. Second, union wage policies raise the opportunity cost of entrepreneurship. Third, inefficiencies in the transmission of...

The preponderance of minimal second language acquisition by immigrants worldwide is striking. This paper proposes a theoretical model, which analyzes the underlying forces that contribute to this outcome of minimal secondary language acquisition by immigrants in such diverse immigrant-receiving...

This paper shows that the opportunity costs resulting from economic interdependence decrease the equilibrium probability of war in an incomplete information game. This result is strongly consistent with existing empirical analyses of the inverse trade-conflict relationship, but is the opposite...