The sovereign debt problems in European countries have increased the interest in fiscal watchdogs. This paper discusses the world’s oldest fiscal watchdog, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis (CPB). Read also the <a href="http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/7929" target="_blank">article</a> at "VoxEU.org" , a <a href="http://mostlyeconomics.wordpress.com/2012/04/23/the-worlds-oldest-fiscal-watchdog-cpb-netherlands-bureau-for-economic-policy-analysis/" target="_blank">blog</a> at "Mostly Economics" and...

Using detailed micro data on the entire wage distribution in the Netherlands, this paper examines trends in Dutch (real pre-tax) wage inequality between 2000 and 2008. For many years, the Netherlands has been considered an exception to the general trend of growing wage inequality that most...

In this paper, we assess spillover effects of Social Assistance (SA) decentralization in the Netherlands, in particular towards (a centrally administered) Disability Insurance scheme (DI). DI enrolment has increased strongly since the decentralization of SA. Many economists and policymakers...

Based on micro-data on individual workers for the period 2000–2005, we show that regional wage differentials in the Netherlands are small but present. A large part of these differentials can be attributed to individual characteristics of workers. Remaining effects are partially...

The Shapley value is a well-known allocation concept in cooperative game theory. It assigns to each player a part of the worth generated by the coalition of all players. The Shapley value is fair in the sense that it satisfies several desirable properties and axioms. We consider a cooperative...

This paper has two aims. First, we uncover some salient components of fixed export costs, which play a crucial role in recent heterogeneous firms models of international trade. Second, we investigate whether the importance of these fixed export costs varies with the size of a firm’s...

Should constraints on urban expansion be relaxed because of external agglomeration economies? In a system of heterogeneous cities, we demonstrate that second-best land use policy consists of a tax on city creation and a subsidy (tax) on urban development in cities in which the marginal-average...

This paper makes use of a new dataset to investigate energy intensity developments in the Netherlands over the period 1987–2005, in comparison with 18 other OECD countries. A key feature of our analysis is that we combine this cross-country perspective with a high level of sector detail,...

In this CPB Discussion Paper, we study how regulators may improve upon the efficiency of their energy technology adoption programs by exploiting readily observable information to limit rent extraction by firms. Using panel data on 862 investment decisions in the Netherlands, we find that rent...

This paper investigates the impact of financial incentives on early-retirement behaviour for high and low wage earners. Using a stylized life-cycle model, we derive hypotheses on the behaviour of the two types. We use administrative data and employ two identification strategies to test the...