We analyze the incentive effects of performance-based contracts, as well as their impacts on provider job placement rates, using unique data on Dutch cohorts of unemployed and disabled workers that were assigned to private social-welfare providers in 2002-2005. In a growing number of...

This paper investigates the impact of alternative environmental policy instruments on technological innovations aiming to improve the energy efficiency in buildings. The empirical analysis focuses on three main types of policy instruments, namely regulatory energy standards in buildings codes,...

We analyse the causal effect of education on starting and quitting smoking, using longitudinal data of Australian twins. We take into account the endogeneity of education, censoring of smoking durations and the timing of starting smoking versus that of completing education by using the flexible...

This paper contributes to the broad literature on public services contracting in two ways: We provide an empirical analysis of contracting decisions in the provision of welfare-to-work (WTW) services, and we explicitly model two forms of external provision of WTW services by municipalities. We...

This research shows that social capital is important in explaining why crime is so heterogeneous across Dutch municipalities. Social capital is considered as a latent construct composed of a variety of indicators, such as blood donations, voter turnout, voluntary contributions to community...

We use a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to determine efficient discount rates for climate (mitigation and adaptation) and non-climate investment in the face of climate change. Our main result is that the non-diversifiable risk in the economy may be related to both shocks in...

Should one calculate user benefits from changes in door-to-door journeys or from changes in the use of separate links of the network? Quite often, the second approach is deemed wrong, as consumers are supposed to demand journeys, not parts of journeys. However, we show that for a quite general...

In labour markets with collective wage bargaining, progressivity of the labour income tax creates a trade-off that allows the degree of progressivity to be determined optimally. On the one hand, wages are lowered and unemployment decreases, on the other hand, the individual labour supply...

This paper analyses two effects of the current Dutch regulation on the system operators of the electricity network and on teh decentralised generators of electricity, and suggests a number of improvements in the tariff regulation. The increase in the distributed generation of electricity, with...

We apply a robust method to the estimation of Impulse Response Functions (IRFs) to paneldata for 99 countries for the period 1974-2001. There is a lively debate on the persistence of the current banking crisis’ impact on output. IRFs estimated by Cerra and Saxena (2008) suggest that these...