We propose a novel econometric model for estimating and forecasting cross-sections of time-varying conditional default probabilities. The model captures the systematic variation in corporate default counts across e.g. rating and industry groups by using dynamic factors from a large panel of...

Using data for 28 European countries for the 2008-2012 period, we examine whether employed individuals are affected by the economic crisis. We provide robust evidence that unfavourable macroeconomic conditions are negatively associated with the life satisfaction of employees. In addition, we...

The econometrics literature proposed several new causal machine learning methods (CML) in the past few years. These methods harness the strength of machine learning methods to flexibly model the relationship between the treatment, outcome and confounders, while providing valid inferential...

A novel debate within competition policy and regulation circles is whether autonomous machine learning algorithms may learn to collude on prices. We show that when fims face short-run price commitments, independent Q-learning (a simple but well-established self-learning algorithm) learns to...

This study examines the applicability of modern Data Science techniques in the domain of Strategy. We apply novel techniques from the field of machine learning and text analysis. We proceed in two steps. First, we compare different machine learning techniques to traditional regression methods in...

When merging firms across large databases in the absence of common identifiers, text algorithms can help. I propose a high-performance fuzzy firm name matching algorithm that uses existing computational methods and works even under hardware restrictions. The algorithm consists of four steps,...

This paper analyzes whether Dutch municipalities became greener between 1999 and 2014 by investigating whether they implement different unit-based pricing systems. Based on their incentive, systems are ranged from green ('weight' ) to less green ('volume' ), or not green ('flat rate' ). In...

In the Netherlands, electronic service delivery has become an important issue in many municipalities. Using the Internet for service delivery is seen as an important element of e-government. Based on 2014-2016 panel-data of ICT service delivery for all Dutch municipalities, we show that there is...

A recent literature in economics assumes that workers differ in their mission preferences. These studies predict a premium on the matching of mission preferences between a worker and employer. This paper uses data from the Dutch LISS panel to examine this prediction for government workers....