In the past two decades the OECD has regularly voiced concern about the labor market exclusion of people with disabilities and about the cost of disability insurance programs. This paper examines whether the fundamental disability insurance reforms that were implemented in the Netherlands have...

This paper investigates the effectiveness of an intervention that was targeted at a specific group of Dutch Social Assistance (SA) recipients with debt problems. With a large share of the income gains of work resumption were transferred to the creditors, these individuals experienced a strong a...

Informal caregiving is a potentially attractive alternative to formal care but may entail health costs for the caregiver. We examine the mental and physical health impact of providing informal care and disentangle the caregiving effect – the effect of caring for someone in need – from the...

In the Netherlands, an immediate baby boom followed the end of WWII and the baby bust of the 1930s. I propose a novel application of the bunching methodology to examine whether the war shifted the timing of fertility or changed women's completed fertility. I disaggregate the number of births by...

I offer a way out of the Taubman-Goldberger controversy on the public policy (ir)relevance of heritability studies by arguing for a quasi-experimentally controlled comparison of the estimates that these studies provide. If the environments individuals are exposed to are under such control,...

At the start of their term, politicians often announce which issue they intend to address. To shed light on this agenda setting, we develop a model in which a politician has to decide whether or not to address a public issue. Addressing an issue means that the politician investigates the issue...

Africa's interior-to-coast roads are well suited to export natural resources, but not to support regional trade. Are they the optimal response to geography and comparative advantage, or the result of suboptimal political distortions? We investigate the political determinants of road paving in...

Legislation affects corporate governance and the return to human and financial capital. We allow the preference of a political majority to determine both the governance structure and the extent of labor rents. In a society where median voters have relatively more at stake in the form of human...

In a democracy, a political majority can influence both the corporategovernance structure and the return to human and financial capital.We argue that when financial wealth is sufficiently diffused, thereis political support for a strong governance role for dispersed equitymarket investors, and...

This survey reviews the literature on the political economy of financial structure, broadly defined to include the size of capital markets and banking systems as well as the distribution of access to external finance across firms.The theoretical literature on the institutional basis for...