Economic research shows that candidates have a higher chance of getting (re-)elected when they have the luck that the world economy does well even though this is beyond their control and unrelated to their competence. Psychological research demonstrates that candidates increase their chances if...

An effective way to foster cooperation is to monitor behaviour and sanction freeriding. Yet, previous studies have shown that cooperation quickly declines when sanctioning mechanisms are removed. We test if explicitly expressing trust in players' capability to maintain cooperation after the...

We use recently collected retrospective survey data to estimate the displacement effect of pension wealth on household savings. The third wave of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, SHARELIFE, collects information on the entire job history of the respondent, a feature missing...

We estimate a collective household model with survey data on financial satisfaction from the European Community Household Panel. Our estimates suggest that cohabitating individuals enjoy returns to scale in consumption that are towards the larger end of the range of estimates reported in the...

This paper aims to assess the relative importance of differences in behaviouralresponses to financial incentives in explaining the observed variation in retirement behaviour across different types of households. We specify and estimate models for singles and married couples and estimate these on...

Since the early nineties, the Dutch tax system allows for a tax-favored form of risk free savings through employer-sponsored savings plans (ESSPs). Under some conditions and up to a certain amount, the contributions to this planare tax-deductible, and the returns as well as the withdrawals are...

This paper focuses on the role of habit formation in individual preferencesover consumption and saving. We closely relate to Alessie and Lusardi's(1997) model as we estimate a model which is based on their closed-formsolution, where saving is expressed as a function of lagged saving and...

Since the beginnings of the eighties house prices in the Netherlands haveincreased steadily and considerably. In this paper we study the effect of this developmenton the demand for second mortgages and on the savings of Dutch households. We use the dataof the Dutch socio-economic panel for the...

The perpetual inventory method used for the construction of education data per country leads to systematic measurement error. This paper analyses the effect of this measurement error on GDP regressions. There is a systematic difference in the education level between census data and observations...

Disentangling age, period, and cohort effects in explaining health trends is crucial to assess future prevalences of health disorders. The identification problem -- age, period, and cohort effects are perfectly linearly related -- is tackled by modeling cohort and period effects using lifetime...