College education is not only an investment; for many people it also generates consumption benefits. If these benefits are normal goods, then the rich attend college at higher rates than the poor. Furthermore, the marginal poor student is smarter than the marginal rich student. Colleges aiming...

Previous research shows that ethnic minority students perform poorer in school when they are taught by ethnic majority teachers. Why this is the case was unclear. This paper focuses on one important potential explanation: I examine whether ethnic majority teachers grade minority and majority...

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in <A HREF="http://www.dovepress.com/condom-use-risk-perception-and-hiv-knowledge-a-comparison-across-sexes-peer-reviewed-article-HIV">'HIV/AIDS - Research and Palliative Care'</A>, 2013, 5, 283-293.<P> We analyze how HIV-knowledge influences condom use across the sexes. The empirical work is based on a household survey conducted among 1,979 households of a representative group of...</p></a>

In this paper we employ techniques developed in spatial econometrics to analyse spatial patterns of technology diffusion, to detect clusters and to estimate theoretical models that incorporate space explicitly. These techniques correct for misspecifications resulting from the omission of spatial...

Published in <A href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9442.2010.01613.x/abstract">The Scandinavian Journal of Economics"</A>, 112(3), 618-39.<P>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...</p></a>

Contemporary migration studies witness an increasing interest in the socio-economicrole of networks of migrants. Such networks are sometimes even regarded as the mostimportant attraction and location factors for migration, and may even exceed purelyeconomic factors like unemployment and wage...

In the Netherlands, the USA and Australia public funding has promoted parental choice by introducing a voucher for child care, where parents are free to choose the provider. The policy experiments in these three countries and the outcomes provide useful information about the consequences of...

This paper analyzes optimal linear taxes on capital and labor incomes in a life-cyclemodel of human capital investment, financial savings, and labor supply with heteroge-nous individuals. A dual income tax with a positive marginal tax rate on not onlylabor income but also capital income is...

This paper investigates the effect of sibship size and birth order on educational attainment, for the United States and the Netherlands. An instrumental variables approach is used to identify the effect of sibship size. Instruments for the number of children are twins at last birth and the sex...

This discussion paper led to a publication in <A href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/full/10.1086/660798">'The Journal of Labor Economics'</A>, 29(4), 859-92.<p>This paper uses a relatively new approach to investigate the effect of parents' schooling on child's schooling; a nonparametric bounds analysis based on Manski and Pepper (2000), using the most recent...</p></a>