This article takes a macroeconomic perspective in studying innovation as one of the channels by which better access to financial markets affects economic development. The GMM difference and system estimators which accommodate country specific heterogeneity, endogenous explanatory variables and...

Over the period 2005-2009 the Dutch government increased childcare subsidies substantially, reducing the average effective parental fee by 50%, and extended subsidies to so-called guestparent care. We estimate the labour supply effect of this reform with a difference-in-differences strategy,...

We study the impact of quality on patient volume and hospital choice for cataract treatments. Our dataset covers the period 2006-2011 and includes all 854,613 patients who underwent a cataract treatment in the Netherlands. At the aggregate-level we find that, a one-point quality increase, on a...

Fiscal equalization through the allocation of central government grants may have adverse distributional implications if these grants capitalize into house values. We investigate the impact of changes in grants induced by a reform of the Dutch grant system. Since this reform was implemented...

This CPB Discussion Paper merges two isolated bodies of literature: the Markov chain model with macro data (MacRae, 1977) and the ecological inference model (Robinson, 1950). Both are choice models. They have the same likelihood function and the same regression equation. Decades ago, this...

This research provides an economic model of the way people behave during an IQ test. We distinguish a technology that describes how time investment improves performance from preferences that determine how much time people invest in each question. We disentangle these two elements empirically...

One of the classic predictions of urban economic theory is that high-income and low-income households choose different residential locations and therefore, conditional on workplace location, have different commuting patterns. According to theory, the effect of household income on commuting...

We review the literature on finance and growth with a focus on developed countries We find little evidence that increases in the traditional proxies for financial development will enhance growth in these countries. Potential causes include: decreasing returns, misallocation of credit,...

This paper first confronts the observed aggregate retirement pattern in the Netherlands with predictions of traditional economic models of retirement. The retirement peaks observed in the data cannot entirely be reconciled with models putting financial incentives central to individual...

Despite the centrality of incentives for innovation in models of economic growth, there is little systematic evidence that the value of technologies varies with market size and institutional arrangements. This paper presents micro-evidence indicating the value of patent rights for a given...