Europe's notoriously high level of unemployment is one of the big puzzles of empirical macroeconomics. In recent years, the unemployment rate has fallen in The Netherlands, but the overall level in OECD Europe remains high. An investigation into why Dutch economic policy has been relatively...

In Chapter 1 of the dissertation, the role of social networks is analyzed as an important determinant in the search behavior of the unemployed. Based on the hypothesis that the unemployed generate information on vacancies through their social network, search theory predicts that individuals with...