The provision of non-pecuniary incentives in education is a topic that has received much scholarly attention lately. Our paper contributes to this discussion by investigating the effectiveness of grade incentives in increasing student performance. We perform a direct comparison of the two most...

Finding proper policy instruments to promote productivity growth features prominently on the Lisbon agenda and is central in many national as well as European policy debates. In view of the increased mobility of high-skilled workers in Europe, ongoing globalization and increased interregional...

We study goal setting using a randomized field experiment involving 1092 first-year undergraduate students. Students have private mentor-student meetings during the year. We instructed a random subset of mentors to encourage students to set a course-specific grade goal during one of the...

We study the effect of an Iranian educational policy implemented in 2012 that restricted access to higher education for women in 30% of Iran's public universities, mostly in sciences and engineering. To analyze the effect of the policy, we use a triple difference strategy across gender, cohorts...

We use admission lotteries for higher education studies in the Netherlands to investigate whether someone's field of study influences the study choices of their younger peers. We find that younger siblings and cousins are strongly affected. Also younger neighbors are affected but to a smaller...

We provide a nonparametric revealed preference approach to demand analysis based on homothetic efficiency. Homotheticity is a useful restriction but data rarely satisfies testable conditions. To overcome this we provide a way to estimate homothetic efficiency of consumption choices. It...

Public programs often use statistical profiling to assess the risk that applicants will become long-term dependent on the program. The literature uses linear probability models and (Cox) proportional hazard models to predict duration outcomes. These either focus on one threshold duration or...

There is an increasing awareness of the potential of nonlinear modeling in regional science, which can partly be explained by the recognition of the limitations of conventional equilibrium models in complex situationsand partly by the easy availability and accessibility of sophisticated...

In this paper, I consider the identification of lagged durationdependence in multiple spells without using the assumtion that there are additionalregressors orthogonal to the individual effects. The non-parametricidentification strategy is applied to the multiple non-employment spells of 2066...

An intensive and still growing body of research focuses on estimating a portfolio’s Value-at-Risk.Depending on both the degree of non-linearity of the instruments comprised in the portfolio and thewillingness to make restrictive assumptions on the underlying statistical distributions, a...