A 1996 change in shopping hours regulations in the Netherlands provides an opportunity to study the effects of timing constraints on total time spent in shopping, working, and other activities as well as the timing of these activities. We develop a simple structural model to make predictions...

The changes in women and men's work lives have been considerable in recent decades. Yet much of the recent research on gender differences in employment and earnings has been of a more snapshot nature rather than taking a longer comparative look at evolving patterns. In this paper, we use 50...

Can the demographic trends of increased life expectancy and decreasing birth rates, along with the labor market patterns of returns to human capital investment and changes in real hourly earnings, account for changes in women's and men's lifetime earnings? Using a Vector Error Correction Model...

Resit exams - extra opportunities to do an exam in the same academic year - are widely prevalent in European higher education, but uncommon in the US. I present a simple theoretical model to compare rational student behavior in the case of only one exam opportunity versus the case of two exam...

This paper analyzes gender differences in jobs while in high school. The availability of school class based samples with detailed information on teenage jobs allows for a comparison of the behavior of boys and girls who are in the same school class, and thus have virtually identical education...

We conduct a public good experiment with high school teenagers. Some groups exclusively consist of students that we know to be friends. Other groups exclusively consist of students that we know not to be friends, and that are mere classmates. We find that 'friends' contribute more to the public...

Each week, the Dutch Postcode Lottery (PCL) randomly selects a postal code, and distributes cash and a new BMW to lottery participants in that code. We study the effects of these shocks on lottery winners and their neighbors. Consistent with the life-cycle hypothesis, the effects on winners’...

We analyze child mortality in Vietnam focusing on gender aspects. Contrary to several other countries in the region, mortality rates for boys are substantially larger than for girls. A large rural-urban mortality difference exists, but much more so for boys than for girls. A higher education...

We study individuals' decisions to decline or accept preventive health care interventions such as flu shots and mammograms. In particular, we analyze the role of perceptions of the effectiveness of the intervention, by eliciting individuals' subjective probabilities of sickness and survival,...