We use a novel quasi-experimental strategy to estimate the effect of expanding early schooling enrollment possibilities on early achievement. It exploits two features of the school system in The Netherlands. The first is rolling admissions; children are allowed to start school immediately after...

Existing field evidence on rank-order tournaments typically does not allow disentangling incentive and sorting effects. We conduct a field experiment illustrating the confounding effect. Students in an introductory microeconomics course selected themselves into tournaments with low, medium, or...

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 estimates the effects of attending medical school on health outcomes by exploiting that admission to medical school in the Netherlands is determined by a lottery. Among the applicants for medical school, people who attended medical school have on average 1.5 more years of completed...

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....

This paper follows an alternative approach to identify the wage effects of private-sector training. The idea is to narrow down the comparison group by only taking into consideration the workers who wanted to participate in training but did not do so because of some random event. This makes the...

Breach remedies serve an important role in protecting relationship-specific investments. Theory predicts that some common remedies protect too well and induce overinvestment, either though complete insurance against potential separation or the possibility that breach is prevented by increasing...

Using a comprehensive Norwegian administrative database, we exploit independent quasi-experimental methods to estimate the effect of class size on student achievement at the end of lower-secondary school. Identification based on maximum class-size rules and population variation (and variations...

This paper explores the hypothesis that wage differentials between skill groups across countries are consistent with a demand and supply framework. Using micro data from 15 countries we find that about one third of the variation in relative wages between skill groups across countries is...