This paper aims to assess the relative importance of differences in behaviouralresponses to financial incentives in explaining the observed variation in retirement behaviour across different types of households. We specify and estimate models for singles and married couples and estimate these on...

It is well known that the take-up rate of the Dutch housing benefit and othermeans tested benefits is substantially below 100%. In order to measure non-take up oneusually has to simulate entitlement to the benefits. In this paper we take a closer look atthe quality of the simulation. We find...

Strikes as a consequence of labour conflicts occur about 28 times as much in France as in the Netherlands. This paper examines the institutional differences underlying these differences in strike activity. Our empirical analysis shows that strike activity is high in France if workers were...

This paper considers tests for a unit root when the innovations follow a near-integrated GARCH process. We compare the asymptotic properties of the likelihoodratio statistic with that of the least-squares based Dickey-Fuller statistic. We first useasymptotics where the GARCH variance process is...

Major events in the life of an elderly individual, such as retirement, a significant decrease in income, death of the spouse, disability, and a move toa nursing home, may affect the mental health status of the individual. Forexample, the individual may enter a prolonged depression. We...

Studies on the determinants of the demand for higher education typically emphasizethe relevance of socio-economic factors, but leave the spatial dimensions of the prospectivestudents’ university choices largely unexplored. In this study, we investigate the determinantsof university entrance...

This paper proposes a new approach to identify the wage effects of training.The idea is to narrow down the comparison group by only taking into consideration theworkers who wanted to participate in training but did not do so because of some randomevent. The point estimate of the return to...

The main contribution of this study is the finding that round numbers can act aspricebarriers for individual stocks. In addition, a first step is made to explain this and therelated phenomena of round number clustering by testing two competing hypotheses,using data from the Dutch stock market...

This paper surveys migration to and from the Netherlands since thesixteenth century with an emphasis on the post-war period. Existingstudies on the labour market performance of immigrants and ethnicminorities are considered and some new results from our recentresearch are presented.

In this paper we analyze a large sample of individual responses to six lottery questions. Wederive a simultaneous estimate of risk aversion ? and the time preference discount rate ? perindividual. This can be done because the consumption of a large prize is smoothed over a largertime period. It...