The concentration of women in the teaching profession is widely noted and generally attributed to gender differences in preferences and social roles. Further, gender segregation exists within this profession – women make up almost all of the primary and pre-primary teaching cohorts, while men...

This study estimates the size and value of unpaid family caretaking activities at a European level. While at a country level several studies are available, a comprehensive evaluation for Europe as a whole was missing so far, mainly due to data limitations. This paper fills this gap using a...

Patterns of informal care are documented throughout the day with Dutch time use diary data. The diary data enable us to identify a, so far overlooked, source of opportunity costs of informal care, i.e. the necessity to perform particular tasks of informal care at specific moments of the day....

Despite the centrality of voting costs to the paradox of voting, little effort has been made to accurately measure these costs outside of a few spatially limited case studies. In this paper, we apply Geographic Information Systems (GIS) tools to validated national election survey data from New...

Disadvantaged communities are often geographically segregated from employment and higher education opportunities. Increasing access can entail substantial welfare gains, but this can also affect the tradeoff faced by young adults between investing in higher education and working for pay. We...

Intuitively, by increasing the opportunity cost of engaging in criminal activities, positive economic shocks should reduce crime. However, the empirical evidence on the relationship between economic shocks and criminal behavior is at best ambiguous. This may be because certain types of shocks...

Men have fallen behind women in education in developed countries. Why? I study the impact of a transitory increase in the opportunity cost of schooling on men's and women's educational attainment. I exploit a reform in Iceland that lowered income taxes to zero for one year and compare teenagers...

Research on the economics of beauty has persistently emphasized beauty premiums in the labor market but ignored its influence within existing marriages. We examine the physical appearance of the wives and its influence on several post-marriage family outcomes using a conceptual framework that is...

There is no robust empirical support for the effect of financial incentives on the decision to work in self-employment rather than as a wage earner. In the literature, this is seen as a puzzle. We offer a focus on the opportunity cost, i.e. the wages given up as an employee. Information on...

This paper describes the theoretical underpinnings and provides empirical evidence for a model that predicts a positive impact of immigration on entrepreneurial activity. Immigrants, we hypothesize, facilitate innovation and entrepreneurship by being willing and able to invest in new skills. At...