This paper explores the hypothesis that wage differentials between skill groups across countries are consistent with a demand and supply framework. Using micro data from 15 countries we find that about one third of the variation in relative wages between skill groups across countries is...

Standard economic theory predicts that firms will not invest in general training and will underinvest in specific training. Empirical evidence, however, indicates that firms do invest in general training of their workers. Evidence from laboratory experiments points to less underinvestment in...

This discussion paper led to a publication in <A href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272775711001427">'Economics of Education Review'</A>, 31(1), 33-44.<p>Policies need not only to be well designed to effectively address market failures, but their parameters also need to be part of agents’ information sets. This is illustrated by government student loans...</p></a>

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 the workers who wanted to participate in training but did not do so because of some random event. The point estimate of the return to...

This paper surveys the economics literature on overeducation. The original motivation to study this topic were reports that the strong increase in the number of college graduates in the early 1970s in the US led to a decrease in the returns to college education. We argue that Duncan and...

A large school consolidation reform in the Netherlands changed minimum school size rules underlying public funding. The supply of schools decreased by 15 percent, but this varied considerably across municipalities. We find that reducing the number of schools by 10 percent increases pupils'...

We use a novel quasi-experimental strategy to estimate the effect of expanding early schooling enrollment possibilities on early achievement. It exploits two features of the school system in The Netherlands. The first is rolling admissions; children are allowed to start school immediately after...

Existing field evidence on rank-order tournaments typically does not allow disentangling incentive and sorting effects. We conduct a field experiment illustrating the confounding effect. Students in an introductory microeconomics course selected themselves into tournaments with low, medium, or...

In this paper we investigate how heterogeneous agents choose among tournaments with different prizes. We show that if the number of agents is sufficiently small, multiple equilibria can arise. Depending on how the prize money is split over the tournaments, these may include, for example, a...

In this paper we investigate how heterogeneous agents choose among tournaments with different prizes. We show that if the number of agents is sufficiently small, multiple equilibria can arise. Depending on how the prize money is split over the tournaments, these may include, for example, a...