See also the article 'Mean and bold: on separating merger economies from structural efficiency gains in the drinking water sector' 2010, <I>The Journal of the Operational Research Society</I>, 61, 222-34.<P> The Dutch drinking water sector experienced two drastic changes over the last 10 years. Firstly,...</p></i>

Growing concern for climate change and rising scarcity of fossil fuels prompted governments to stimulate the development of renewables. This paper empirically tests whether feed-in tariff (FIT) policies have been effective in the development of photovoltaic solar (PV), explicitly taking into...

An important question in the dynamic European wholesale markets for electricity is whether to define the geographical market at the level of an individual member state or more broadly. We show that if we currently take the traditional approach by considering for each member state whether there...

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in <I>Empirica</I>, 40, 607-34. Ample evidence is available for the effect of competition on educational quality as only a few countries allow large scale competition. In the Netherlands free parental choice is present since the beginning of the 20th...</i>

Much attention has been paid to the influence of the institutional form of waste collection on costs. We extend this literature in three directions by including the unit-based pricing system. First, we show that unit-based pricing systems are more important from a cost-minimizing point of view...

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in the <I>Journal of Environmental Economics & Management</I>, 2009, 58, 27-42.<P> The literature that tests for U-shaped relationships using panel data, such as those between pollution and income or inequality and growth, reports widely divergent...</p></i>

The literature suggests that competition among schools might increase quality. However, not much empirical evidence is present as only a few countries allow competition at a large scale. One exception is the Netherlands. Free parental choice is the leading principle of the Dutch education system...

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...

The EU advocates a household waste recycling rate of more than 70%. Although the Netherlands already years ago invested in recycling policies heavily, this is still a large challenge as nowadays on average this rate is approximately 50% and nearly no municipalities have a rate above 70%. Given...