Using a discontinuity in the funding scheme, we evaluate the impact of home visits and child care centers on poor children and mothers in Ecuador. We find that home visits are beneficial for children's cognitive outcomes and health and for mothers' psychological well-being but reduce mothers'...

To raise school attendance, many programs in developing countries eliminate or reduce private contributions to education. This paper documents an unintended negative effect of such programs. Using data from a randomized experiment that provides free uniforms to primary school children in...

Theory predicts that default breach remedies are immaterial whenever contracting costs are negligible. Some experimental studies, however, suggest that in practice default rules do matter, as they may affect parties' preferences over contract terms. This paper presents results from an experiment...

Recent studies for primary and secondary education find positive effects of the share of girls in the classroom on achievement of boys and girls. This study examines whether these results can be extrapolated to post-secondary education. We conduct an experiment in which the shares of girls in...

A large empirical literature in behavioral economics investigates heterogeneity across individuals and groups in preferences for competition. In this study, we provide a more detailed view on competitiveness by differentiating between four different motivations for entering competitions –...

We use Dutch register data to document the understudied phenomenon of teacher segregation. We show that teachers in primary and secondary schools in the four largest cities of the country – Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht – are segregated in terms of their migration and social...

We combine data from the Amsterdam secondary-school match with register data and survey data to estimate the effects of not being assigned to one's first-ranked school on academic outcomes and on a wide range of other outcomes. For identification we use that secondaryschool assignment in...

We use admission lotteries for higher education studies in the Netherlands to investigate whether someone's field of study influences the study choices of their younger peers. We find that younger siblings and cousins are strongly affected. Also younger neighbors are affected but to a smaller...

We explore the effect of schooling on health, wealth and happiness for a cohort of Dutch individuals born around 1940. We also use observations on childhood IQ and family background. The most fortunate group is the group with a non-vocational intermediate level education: they score highest on...

Standard economic theory predicts that firms will not invest in general training and will underinvest in specific training. Empirical evidence, however, indicates that firms do invest in general training of their workers. Evidence from laboratory experiments points to less underinvestment in...