A shortage of teachers in primary and secondary schools in the Netherlands is expected in the near future as a large part of the current workforce will retire. Recently, the Dutch government has decided to increase wages of teachers. This paper qualitatively assesses the impact of three...

This paper evaluates the effects of a special program designed to increase school enrolment and employment among multi-problem youths. Treated youths are guided by personal coaches and receive a comprehensive treatment of educational, work, and health services. We investigate the impact of the...

Recently, there has been considerable debate about a reform of the Dutch system of student support, in which grants will be (partly) replaced by loans. The discussion focuses on the effects on student enrollment decisions. Surprisingly, no study has yet analysed the effect of receiving a grant...

This study provides the first estimates of the causal effect of time in school on cognitive skills for many countries around the world, for multiple age groups and for multiple subjects. These estimates enable a comparison of the performance of education systems based on gain scores instead of...

This paper investigates the effect of coaching in vocational education on school dropout using data from a randomized experiment. We find that one year of coaching reduces school dropout by more than 40 percent from 17 to 10 percentage points. The reduction in school dropout results from two...

This paper examines the causal link that runs from classroom quality to student achievement using data on twin pairs who entered the same school but were allocated to different classrooms in an exogenous way. In particular, we apply twin fixed-effects estimation to assess the effect of teacher...

In many Dutch cities there are Geert Groote schools. This is no coincidence, because Geert Groote's (1340-1384) ideas form the foundation of modern education in the Netherlands and many other countries. Much less known is that his investments, and those of his followers, have put the...

We analyse the causal effect of education on starting and quitting smoking, using longitudinal data of Australian twins. We take into account the endogeneity of education, censoring of smoking durations and the timing of starting smoking versus that of completing education by using the flexible...

Early school-leaving is considered to be one of the major problems in Dutch education. In order to reduce the number of dropouts in the school year 2006-2007 the Dutch government has offered a financial incentive scheme to 14 out of 39 regions. This scheme provides a reward of 2000 euro per...

The market for higher education increasingly becomes an international market. Nowadays, the number of students studying abroad is substantial and increasing. Many governments stimulate students to study abroad by offering a wide range of grants. However, little is known on the returns to...