This discussion paper resulted in an article in the <I>Journal of Development Economics</I> (2013). Volume 103, pages 43-51.<P> To raise school attendance, many programs in developing countries eliminate orreduce private contributions to education. This paper documents an unintendednegative effect of such...</p></i>

This discussion paper resulted in an article in <I>Economics of Education Review</I>. Volume 38, pages 51-63.<P> Recent studies for primary and secondary education find positive effects of the share of girls in the classroom on achievement of boys and girls. This study examines whether these results can...</p></i>

This discussion paper led to a publication in <A href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272775711001427">'Economics of Education Review'</A>, 31(1), 33-44.<p>Policies need not only to be well designed to effectively address market failures, but their parameters also need to be part of agents’ information sets. This is illustrated by government student loans...</p></a>

A large school consolidation reform in the Netherlands changed minimum school size rules underlying public funding. The supply of schools decreased by 15 percent, but this varied considerably across municipalities. We find that reducing the number of schools by 10 percent increases pupils'...

This paper reports on a randomized field experiment in which first-year university students could earn financial rewards for passing all first-year requirements within one year. Financial incentives turn out to have positive effects on achievement of high-ability students, whereas they have a...

This paper reports about a randomized experiment in which training vouchers of €1000 were given to low-skilled workers. The vouchers increase training participation by almost 20 percentage points in two years, relative to a base rate of 0.45. This increased participation comes at a substantial...

This paper estimates peer effects originating from the ability composition of tutorial groups for undergraduate students in economics. We manipulated the composition of groups to achieve a wide range of support, and assigned students – conditional on their ability – randomly. The data...

This paper reports on a field experiment testing for sunk-cost effects in an education setting. Students signing up for extra-curricular tutorial sessions randomly received a discount on the tuition fee. The sunk-cost effect predicts that students who receive larger discounts will attend fewer...

We study student loan behavior in the Netherlands where (i) higher education students know little about the conditions of the government's financial aid program and (ii) take-up rates are low. In a field experiment we manipulated the amount of information students have about these conditions....

To raise school attendance, many programs in developing countries eliminate or