A large school consolidation reform in the Netherlands changed minimum school size rules underlying public funding. The supply of schools decreased by 15 percent, but this varied considerably across municipalities. We find that reducing the number of schools by 10 percent increases pupils'...

This Paper reports a randomized field experiment in which first year economics and business students at the University of Amsterdam could earn financial rewards for passing all first year requirements before the start of their second academic year. Participants were assigned to a high reward...

A vast body of empirical studies lends support to the incentive effects of rank-order tournaments. Evidence comes from experiments in laboratories and non-experimental studies exploiting sports or firm data. Selection of competitors across tournaments may bias these non-experimental studies,...

In this paper we investigate how heterogeneous agents choose among tournaments with different prizes. We show that if the number of agents is sufficiently small, multiple equilibria can arise. Depending on how the prize money is split over the tournaments, these may include, for example, a...

See also the article in <A href="http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/search/allsearch?mode=quicksearch&products=journal&WISsearch1=1099-1255&WISindexid1=issn&contentTitle=Journal+of+Applied+Econometrics&contextLink=blah&contentOID=4079&WISsearch2=Leuven&WISindexid2=WISauthor&articleGo.x=14&articleGo.y=9"><I>Journal of Applied Econometrics</I></A>, 2008, 23(4), 423-34.<P>

In a randomized field experiment where first year university students could earn financial rewards for passing all first year requirements within one year we find small and non-significant average effects of financial incentives on the pass rate and the numbers of collected credit points. There...

This paper reports about a randomized field experiment in which first year economics and business students at the University of Amsterdam could earn financial rewards for passing the first year requirements within one year. Participants were assigned to a high, low and zero (control) reward...

This paper proposes a new approach to identify the wage eects of training.The idea is to narrow down the comparison group by only taking into consideration theworkers who wanted to participate in training but did not do so because of some randomevent. The point estimate of the return to training...

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...

This discussion paper led to a publication in <A href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272775711001427">'Economics of Education Review'</A>, 31(1), 33-44.<p>Policies need not only to be well designed to effectively address market failures, but their parameters also need to be part of agents’ information sets. This is illustrated by government student loans...</p></a>