We hypothesize, and test for, a negative effect of the length of the commute on worker’s productivity, by examining whether the commute has a positive effect on worker’s absenteeism. Our estimates for Germany indicate that commuting distance induces absenteeism with an elasticity of about...

A new paradigm for transport economists has been established: revenues of a welfare-maximising road tax should be employed to reduce the level of a distortionary income tax. An essential assumption to reach this conclusion is that the number of workdays is optimally chosen, whereas daily...

One of the classic predictions of the urban economic theory is that high-income and low-income households choose different residential locations and therefore, conditional on workplace location, have different commuting patterns. Empirical tests of this theory are not standard, due to unobserved...

There is little known about the effects of staggered-hours programs that affect workers' working schedules to mitigate peak congestion. We examine the effect of workers' morning start times on their wages for Germany. In contrast to previous work based on cross-section data, we demonstrate that...

We analyse the effects of distortionary company car taxation through increased household carownership for the Netherlands. We use several identification strategies and demonstrate thatfor about 20 percent of households company car possession increases car ownership. Theannual welfare loss of...

This paper provides quasi-experimental evidence of the health benefits of a largescale, nationwide programme of home energy-efficiency retrofits in the Netherlands, exploiting individual medicine use from insurers' records. We demonstrate that these home upgrades improve children's health, as...

Highway construction occurs nowadays mainly through widening of ex- isting roads rather than building new roads. This paper documents that highway widenings considerably reduce congestion in the short run, defined here as 6 years. Using longitudinal microdata from highway detector loops in the...

In the extensive job search literature, studies assume either sequential or non-sequential search. Which assumption is more reasonable? This paper introduces a novel method to test the hypothesis that firms search sequentially based on the relationship between the number of (rejected) job...

A new paradigm for transport economists has been established: revenues of a welfare-maximising road tax should be employed to reduce the level of a distortionary income tax. An essential modelling assumption to reach this conclusion is that the number of workdays is optimally chosen, whereas...

This paper introduces a method for estimating workers' marginal willingness to pay for job attributes employing data on job search activity. Worker's willingness to pay to avoid a temporary contract, which increases the risk of becoming unemployed, is derived for Lithuania. The empirical...