It is well known that the take-up rate of the Dutch housing benefit and other means tested benefits is substantially below 100%. In order to measure non-take up one usually has to simulate entitlement to the benefits. In this paper we take a closer look at the quality of the simulation. We find...

In this paper the relation between religion and income is investigated using a micro-dataset for the Netherlands. Religiosity is measured by religious membership and by participation. Instead of estimating separately a religion and an income equation, joint regression is preferred since this...

Published in: Luigino Bruni and Pierluigi Porta (eds.), 'Economics and Happiness. Framing the Analysis', Oxford University Press, 2005.

Which signals are important in gaining attention in science? For a group of 1,371 scientific articles published in 17 demography journals in the years 1990-1992 we track their influence and discern which signals are important in receiving citations. Three types of signals are examined: the...

Firms signal high quality through high prices even if the market structure is highly competitive and price competition is severe. In a symmetric Bertrand oligopoly where products may differ only in their quality, production cost is increasing in quality and the quality of each firm’s product...

It is often assumed that transfers received from governments, nongovernment organizations (NGOs), friends and relatives help rural households to pool risk. In this paper I investigate two functions of transfers in Ethiopia: risk pooling and income redistribution. Unlike most of the literature...

The Commonwealth of Virginia abolished parole and reformed sentencing for all felony of- fenders committed on or after January 1, 1995. We examine the impact of this legislation on reported crime rates using different time series approaches. In particular, structural time series models are...

This paper presents evidence about the impact on school enrollment of a program in Ecuador that gives cash transfers to the 40 percent poorest families. The evaluation design consists of a randomized experiment for families around the first quintile of the poverty index and of a regression...

This paper provides new estimates of the impact of the French tax credit on the employment outcomes of women. We model simultaneously the employment probability and the determinants of programme eligibility. We improve on earlier studies in this field that, using a single evaluation equation...

Unemployment remains a major economic and social problem in many developed