This paper investigates whether cannabis use affects physical and mental health. To do so, information on prime aged individuals living in Amsterdam in 1994 is used. Dutch data offer a clear advantage in estimating the health impacts of cannabis use because the legal status of cannabis in the...

This paper examines heterogeneity in price stickiness using a large, original, set of individual price data collected at the retail level for the computation of the French CPI. For that purpose, we estimate at a very high level of disaggregation competing-risks duration models that distinguish...

The lemons model assumes that owners of used cars have an informational advantage over potential buyers with respect to the quality of their vehicles. Owners of bad cars will try to sell them to unsuspecting buyers while owners of good cars will hold on to theirs. Consequently, the quality of...

This paper investigates whether cannabis use leads to worse mental health. To do so, we account for common unobserved factors affecting mental health and cannabis consumption by modeling mental health jointly with the dynamics of cannabis use. Our main finding is that using cannabis increases...

Recent evaluations of active labour market policies are not very optimistic about their effectiveness to bring unemployed back to work. An important reason is that unemployed get locked-in, that is they reduce their effort to find a regular job. This Paper uses an administrative data set from...

In the mid-1980s, several European countries, characterized by high levels of employment protection, introduced fixed-term contracts. Since then most accessions to employment have been through fixed-term contracts. This Paper studies the duration pattern of fixed-term contracts and the...

During the 1930s, rating agencies took up a central role in regulatory supervision that they still have today. We study the process through which they received this regulatory license. The proximate cause for this changeover was the economic shock of the Great Depression. Exploring the...

Over the last two centuries, many countries experienced regime transitions toward democracy. We document this democratic transition over a long time horizon. We use historical time series of income, education and democracy levels from 1870 to 2000 to explore the economic factors associated with...