Biased longevity expectations will lead to suboptimal decisions regarding saving, retirement, annuitization and health, with consequences for wellbeing in old age. Systematic differences in the accuracy of longevity expectations may partly explain heterogeneity in economic behaviour by education...

The provision of non-pecuniary incentives in education is a topic that has received much scholarly attention lately. Our paper contributes to this discussion by investigating the effectiveness of grade incentives in increasing student performance. We perform a direct comparison of the two most...

Donor agencies and recipient governments want to assess the effectiveness of aid-supported sector policies. Unfortunately, existing methods for impact evaluation are designed for the evaluation of homogeneous interventions (‘projects’) where those with and without ‘treatment’ can be...

In this paper we hypothesize that education is associated with a higher efficiency of health investment, yet that this efficiency advantage is solely driven by intelligence. We operationalize efficiency of health investment as the probability of dying conditional on a certain hospital diagnosis,...

The literature suggests that competition among schools might increase quality. However, not much empirical evidence is present as only a few countries allow competition at a large scale. One exception is the Netherlands. Free parental choice is the leading principle of the Dutch education system...

We aim to disentangle the relative contributions of (i) cognitive ability, and (ii) education on health and mortality using a structural equation model suggested by Conti et al. (2010). We extend their model by allowing for a duration dependent variable, and an ordinal educational variable. Data...

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in 'Economics and Human Biology' (forthcoming).<P> Taller individuals typically have occupations with higher social status and higher earnings than shorter individuals. Further, entrepreneurship is associated with high social status in numerous...</p>

This discussion paper led to an article in the <I>Journal of Human Resources</I> (2011). Volume 46(4), pages 695-721.<P> While there is no doubt that health is strongly correlated with education, whether schooling exerts a causal impact on health is not yet firmly established. We exploit Dutch compulsory...</p></i>

This paper investigates the effect of sibship size and birth order on educational attainment, for the United States and the Netherlands. An instrumental variables approach is used to identify the effect of sibship size. Instruments for the number of children are twins at last birth and the sex...

Higher educated individuals are healthier and live longer than their lower educated peers. One reason is that lower educated individuals engage more in unhealthy behaviours including consumption of a poor diet, but it is not clear why they do so. In this paper we develop an economic theory of...