This paper explores whether and why the pandemic differentially altered women and men's consumption behavior. After the 2020 wave of lockdown restrictions were lifted, women reduced consumption more than men. Data on self-reported reasons for consuming less reveals that gender differences in...

Prospective economic developments depend on the behavior of consumer spending. A key question is whether private expenditures recover once social distancing restrictions are lifted or whether the COVID-19 crisis has a sustained impact on consumer confidence, preferences, and, hence, spending....

Central banks resorted to asset purchase programs to replace conventional policy measures, which became ineffective after interest rates approached the zero lower bound. We investigate their effects on financial markets and focus on heterogeneous transmission using a Bayesian structural vector...

Basing-point pricing is known to have been abused by geographically dispersed firms in order to eliminate competition on transportation costs. This paper develops a topographic test for collusive basing-point pricing. The method uses transaction data (prices, quantities) and customer project...

Macroeconomic disasters (wars, pandemics, depressions) are characterized by drastic shifts and increased volatility of the aggregate consumption to income ratio. By standard intertemporal budget constraint logic, this ratio is linked to expectations of future income and consumption growth rates....

This paper investigates the effect of parental separation on homelessness. Previous studies are limited in their ability to isolate this effect and can only provide descriptive evidence that parental separations relate to reductions in housing quality and stability. Using a unique dataset of...

This paper studies the event-history approach to microeconometric programevaluation. We present a mixed semi-Markov event-history model, discussits application to program evaluation, and analyze its empirical content.The results of this paper provide fundamental insights in what can be...

We test whether different empirical methods give different results when evaluating job-search assistance programs. Budgetary problems at the Dutch unemployment insurance (UI) administration in March 2010, caused a sharp drop in the availability of these programs. Using administrative data...