Year: 2024
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The (un-)intended consequences of a ban on commission-based financial advice
This project examines how changes in financial advisor remuneration impact consumers’ financial decisions and outcomes. Advisor remuneration often includes sales commissions, incentivizing biased advice toward high-fee products that generate higher commissions (Bergstresser, Chalmers, and Tufano, 2009; Del Guercio and Reuter, 2014; Christoffersen, Evans, and Musto, 2013; Hoechle et al., 2018; Egan, 2019). Consequently, regulators often…
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Societal Segregation: Disentangling Choice from Opportunity using Dutch Register Data
This research aims to illuminate the root causes of social and economic segregation: is it driven more by individual preferences to form relationships to different versus similar others or is it exacerbated by a lack of diversity in the social spaces (e.g. schools, workplaces, neighborhoods) that people navigate? Segregation, where people of different races, migration…
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Life with dementia
Dementia affects many aspects of life over a prolonged period. Yet, when studying dementia, social scientists working with administrative data typically rely on proxy measures for dementia that mean that important questions, e.g. about the diagnosis or disease stage, cannot be answered. We solve this problem by linking population registry data at Statistics Netherlands to…
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The health effects of air pollution in the Netherlands
This project studies the causal effects of air pollution on medication prescriptions, hospitalizations, and health care expenditures. We aim to combine detailed administrative data from Statistics Netherlands with records from the RIVM (Dutch: Rijksinstituut voor Volksgezondheid en Milieu) on local air pollution. We use several econometric methods to identify the causal effect of air pollution…
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Socio-economic and health impacts of family planning support for vulnerable women and men in the Netherlands
Making well-deliberated and informed decisions about family planning and contraceptive use does not come naturally to everyone. Although vulnerable individuals are shown to have lower uptake of contraceptives, evidence on targeted interventions to assist vulnerable individuals in their family planning is lacking. With this study, I aim to provide causal evidence of the impacts of…
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Building up Employability: Evidence from Curriculum Updates in the Netherlands
Trends like digitalization and the energy transition are major drivers of changes in the demand for skills in the labor market. Vocational education and training (VET) play a crucial role to train students for practical roles and prepare them for these changes. This study focuses on Dutch VET graduates and investigates the consequences of curriculum…
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Improving Diagnosis of Memory Decline by assessing the effects of Age, Education and Socio-Economic Status on Forgetting
Assessing long-term memory function is crucial for diagnosis and treatment in a wide range of clinical cases, including the early detection of Alzheimer’s disease. In order to effectively assess memory abnormalities in clinical populations, it is crucial to collect normative data from a representative sample of individuals in the Netherlands. This project uses a newly…
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Blueprint or blank slate? Nature-nurture beliefs and parenting
While it is nowadays well established that both “nature” and “nurture” are important determinants of child development, people differ in their beliefs about the relative importance of genetic and environmental influences. In this project, we study how these beliefs shape parenting. Given the significant impact of parental investments on children’s outcomes later in life, the…
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Smartphone Use and Smartphone Addiction in the Netherlands: Attitudes towards Interventions
Smartphone usage has significantly increased in the Netherlands, with the population owning a smartphone rising from 80% in 2017 to 91% in 2022. On average, we spend nearly three hours per day on our smartphones. The growing integration of smartphones into daily life raises concerns about the potential for smartphone “addiction”, where individuals become anxious…
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Do you think I should work part-time? The role of personal preferences and societal expectations surrounding part-time work in the Netherlands
The Netherlands has the highest rates of part-time work in Europe, with 63% of women and 23% of men working part-time. While part-time work may enhance work-life balance, it also increases the risk of poverty in retirement. This gender gap raises questions about whether it is driven by internalized societal norms around household responsibilities beyond…