This paper focuses on the increase in slack costs due to municipality amalgamation, which is pushed forward in several countries to achieve economies of scale. Employing the stochastic frontier cost function to estimate the inefficiency of local public expenditure due to slack, this study...

We estimate the effects of robot adoption on firm-level and worker-level outcomes in the Netherlands using a large employer-employee panel dataset spanning 2009-2020. Our firm-level results confirm previous findings, with positive effects on value added and hours worked for robot-adopting firms...

This paper presents new causal evidence on the "power" of oral contraceptives in shaping women's lives, leveraging the 1970 liberalization of the Pill for minors in the Netherlands and demand- and supply-side religious preferences that affected Pill take-up. We analyze administrative data to...

What are the consequences of religious obligations conflicting with civic duties? We investigate this question by evaluating changes in the performance of practicing Muslim students when end-of-secondary-school exams and Ramadan overlapped in the Netherlands. Using administrative data on exam...

We provide a historical perspective on the birth order effect by examining differences in adult occupational rank among brothers in 19th and early 20th century Netherlands. Using a rich historical dataset compiling administrative birth and marriage registry records linking family members, we...

Schematically one can distinguish two traditions related to ethnic statistics in Europe. In France, Germany and most southern European countries, the dominant statistical categorisations merely distinguish individuals on the basis of their nationality. In contrast, most northern European...

The selective inflow and outflow of residents by ethnicity is the main mechanism behind ethnic residential segregation. Many studies have found that ethnic minorities are more likely than others to move to ethnic minority concentration neighbourhoods. An important question which remains largely...

We study changes in job security after displacement and exploit eligibility rules for lump-sum payments in the Netherlands to investigate the role of liquid wealth. Within five years of job loss, the likelihood of being in permanent employment remains 12% lower for displaced workers. Those...

In the Netherlands, an immediate baby boom followed the end of WWII and the baby bust of the 1930s. I propose a novel application of the bunching methodology to examine whether the war shifted the timing of fertility or changed women's completed fertility. I disaggregate the number of births by...