Impact evaluations of development programmes usually focus on a comparison of participants with a control group. However, if the programme generates externalities for non-participants such an approach will capture only part of the programme’s impact. Based on a unique large-scale quantitative...

Many cities are trying to attract tourists by investing in urban amenities. Cultural heritage is an important example and substantial investments are needed to keep ancient inner cities and characteristic monumental buildings in good shape. The costs of these policies are usually clear, the...

Most measures of vulnerability are a-theoretic and essentially static. In this paper we use a stochastic Ramsey model to find a household's optimal welfare and we measure vulnerability as the shortfall from the welfare attained if the household consumed permanently at the poverty line. The...

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...

This paper estimates the impact of the murder of film maker Theo vanGogh on November 2, 2004, on listed house prices in Amsterdam with aunique dataset. We use an hedonic-market approach to show that gen-eral attitudes towards Muslim minorities were negatively affected by themurder. Specifically,...

This paper addresses the question to what extent the performance of industrial sites is affected by their local economic structure and accessibility. For this aim, we test for the existence of statistically significant relationships between agglomeration externalities (specialization, diversity,...

This paper analyzes the impact of a leading entrepreneurship education program on college students’ entrepreneurship competencies and intentions using an instrumental variables approach in a difference-in-differences framework. We exploit that the program was offered to students at one...

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...

In recent years there has been a tremendous growth in the influx of news related to traded assets in international financial markets. This financial news is now available via print media but also through real-time online sources such as internet news and social media sources. The increase in the...

In this paper, we use a recent policy change in the Netherlands to study how changes in search requirements for the older unemployed affect their transition rates to employment, early retirement and sickness/disability benefits. The reform, becoming effective on January 1st 2004, required the...