In this paper we model expenditure on housing for owners and renters by means of endogenous switching regression models using cross-section data. We explain the share of housing in total expenditure from family characteristics and total expenditure, where the latter is allowed to be endogenous....

While the fraction of obese people is not as large in Europe as in the United States, obesity is becoming an important issue in Europe as well. Using comparable data from the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) and the Health and Retirement Study in the U.S. (HRS), we...

This paper investigates the role of pain in determining self-reported work disability in the US, the UK, and The Netherlands. Even if identical questions are asked, cross-country differences in reported work disability remain substantial. In the US and The Netherlands, respondent evaluations of...

Self-reported work disability is analyzed in the US and The Netherlands. The raw data show that Dutch respondents much more often report that they have a work limiting health problem than respondents in the US. The difference remains when controlling for demographic characteristics and observed...

We use panel data to analyze the determinants of speaking fluency and wages of immigrants. Our model takes account of two problems that may bias OLS estimates of the impact of speaking fluency on earnings. First, subjective variables on an ordinal discrete scale, such as self-reported language...

Since the early nineties, the Dutch tax system allows for a tax-favored form of risk free savings through employer- sponsored savings plans (ESSPs). Under some conditions and up to a certain amount, the contributions to this plan are tax-deductible, and the returns as well as the withdrawals are...

Earlier research suggests that many people in their fifties and early sixties are not well informed about their Social Security benefit entitlements in old age. This paper investigates the effect of deviations between individuals’ anticipated and realized Social Security benefits on several...

In contrast to the believed similarity in their health outcomes, workers in different Western countries report very different rates of work disability. Using new data from the United States and the Netherlands, we offer a partial resolution to this paradox. We find that observed differences in...

We combine the choice data of proposers and responders in the ultimatum game, their expectations elicited in the form of subjective probability questions, and the choice data of proposers ("dictators") in a dictator game to estimate a structural model of decision making under uncertainty. We use...

Structural models explaining retirement decisions of individuals or households in an intertemporal setting are typically hard to estimate using data on actual retirement decisions, since choice sets are for a large part unobserved by the researcher. This paper describes an experiment in which...