This paper formulates a simple skill and education model to explain how better access to higher education leads to stronger assortative mating on skills of parents and more polarized skill and earnings distributions of children. Swedish data show that in the second half of the 20th century more...

We test whether different empirical methods give different results when evaluating job-search assistance programs. Budgetary problems at the Dutch unemployment insurance (UI) administration in March 2010, caused a sharp drop in the availability of these programs. Using administrative data...

To study the long-term effects of school-starting-age rules in a setting with early ability tracking, we exploit the birth month threshold used in the Netherlands. We find that students born just after the threshold perform better at the end of primary school than students born just before it....