Better Protected, Better Paid: Evidence on How Employment Protection Affects Wages

This paper empirically establishes the effect of the employer's term of notice on the wage level of employees. The term of notice is defined as the period an employer has to notify workers in advance of their upcoming dismissal. The wages paid during this period are an important element of firing costs and hence employment protection. To find a causal effect, I exploit the exogenous change in the term of notice that resulted from the introduction of a new Dutch law in 1999. Strong evidence is found that a longer 'dormant' term of notice leads to higher wages. In my sample, an additional month of notice increases wages by three percent, ceteris paribus.employment protection, term of notice, wages

Preparing for Policy Changes: Social Security Expectations and Pension Scheme Participation

Western governments are currently contemplating how to adapt their Pay-As-You-Go pension systems so that these remain financially sustainable, even with an aged population. To the extent that policy-makers haven't already adapted their old age social security schemes, an ageing population thus leads to policy uncertainty in first pillar pensions. This paper sheds more light on the relationship between public and private savings by analyzing private pension scheme participation in the presence of such policy uncertainty. To do so, I assess the influence of subjective policy change expectations on voluntary pension scheme participation in the Netherlands. I find that participation in private pension schemes is higher for those who assign a high probability to the dismantlement of old age social security – in terms of lower benefits levels but more so in terms of a higher eligibility age. In addition, subjectively short-lived individuals who believe an eligibility age increase to be more likely than a benefit level cut, participate more. This could be explained by the fact that the relative cost of an eligibility age increase is larger for those who expect to live shorter. Individuals hence do prepare themselves for anticipated policy changes in old age social security and policy uncertainty in social security thus seems to lead to an increase in, or crowding in of, private savings.ageing, savings behavior, social security, subjective probabilities, uncertainty

Better Protected, Better Paid: Evidence on How Employment Protection Affects Wages

This paper empirically establishes the effect of the employer's term of notice on the wage level of employees. The term of notice is defined as the period an employer has to notify workers in advance of their up-coming dismissal. The wages paid during this period are an important element of firing costs and hence employment protection. To find a causal effect, I exploit the exogenous change in the term of notice that resulted from the introduction of a new Dutch law in 1999. Strong evidence is found that a longer ‘dormant’ term of notice leads to higher wages. In my sample, an additional month of notice increases wages by three percent, ceteris paribus.employment protection, wages, fixed effects

School Responsiveness to Quality Rankings: An Empirical Analysis of Secondary Education in the Netherlands

This paper analyzes the response of secondary schools to changes in their quality ratings. The current analysis is the first to address the impact of quality scores that have been published by a newspaper (Trouw), rather than public interventions. Our research design exploits the substantial lags in the registration and publication of the Trouw scores and that takes into account all possible outcomes of the ratings, instead of the lowest category only. Overall, we find evidence that school quality performance does respond to Trouw quality scores. Both average grades increase and the number of diplomas go up after receiving a negative score. For schools that receive the most negative ranking, the short-term effects (one year after a change in the ranking of schools) of quality transparency on final exam grades equal 10% to 30% of a standard deviation compared to the average of this variable. The estimated long run impacts are roughly equal to the short-term effects that are measured.school quality, school accountability

Ranking the Schools: How Quality Information Affects School Choice in the Netherlands

This paper analyzes whether information on high school quality published by a national newspaper affects school choice in the Netherlands. For this purpose, we use both school level and individual student level data. First, we study the causal effect of quality scores on the influx of new high school students using a longitudinal school dataset. We find that negative (positive) school quality scores decrease (increase) the number of students choosing a school after the year of publication. The positive effects are particularly large for the academic school track. An academic school track receiving the most positive score sees its inflow of students rise by 15 to 20 students. Second, we study individual school choice behaviour to address the relative importance of the quality scores, as well as potential differences in the quality response between socio-economic groups. Although the probability of attending a school is affected by its quality score, it is mainly driven by the travelling distance. Students are only willing to travel about 200 meters more in order to attend a well-performing rather than an average school. In contrast to equity concerns that are often raised, we cannot find differences in information responses between socio-economic groups.school quality, school choice, information, media

Ranking the schools: How quality information affects school choice in the Netherlands

Both school level and individual student level data indicate that information on highschool quality published by a national newspaper affects school choice in the Netherlands. The positive effects are particularly large for the academic school track. First, we study the causal effect of quality scores on the influx of new highschool students using a longitudinal school dataset. We find that negative (positive) school quality scores decrease (increase) the number of students choosing a school after the year of publication. An academic school track receiving the most positive score sees its inflow of students rise by 15 to 20 students. Second, we study individual school choice behavior to address the relative importance of the quality scores, as well as potential differences in the quality response between socio-economic groups. Although the probability of attending a school is affected by its quality score, it is mainly driven by the traveling distance. Students are willing to travel only about 200 meters more to attend a well-performing rather than an average school. In contrast to equity concerns that are often raised, we cannot find differences in information responses between socio-economic groups.

Have You Heard the News? How Real-Life Expectations React to Publicity

As evidence is accumulating that subjective expectations influence behavior and that these expectations are sometimes biased, it becomes policy-relevant to know how to influence individuals' expectations. Information in the media is likely to affect how people picture the future. This paper studies the role of public information dissemination, or publicity, in a real-life expectations formation process. For this purpose, an exceptional Dutch dataset on monthly expectations regarding the future eligibility age for old age social security is analyzed. On average, the publicity reaction in eligibility age expectations is small but the differences among subgroups are considerable. I find that higher educated and high income groups hardly adapt their expectations to relevant publicity. On the contrary, those who do not often read a newspaper have a relatively high publicity reaction. A potential explanation for this latter finding is that these groups have low quality initial expectations. If this is true, publicity thus particularly benefits the initially worse informed groups.expectations, information, media

Kinky Choices, Dictators and Split Might: A Non-Cooperative Model for Household Consumption and Labor Supply

It is unlikely that husbands and wives always agree on exactly what public goods to buy. Nor do they necessarily agree on how many hours to work with obvious consequences for the household budget. We therefore model consumption and labor supply behavior of a couple in a non-cooperative setting by adopting a Nash approach. Using minimal assumptions, we prove that demand for public goods is characterized by three regimes. It is either determined by the preferences of one of the partners only (Husband Dictatorship or Wife Dictatorship), or by both spouses' preferences where a partner's influence depends on the spouses' relative wage rates (Split Might). These regimes imply a kinked nature of the couple's aggregate demand curves. By imposing more structure on the model, we can derive testable implications on observed demand for public goods and labor supply that allow testing the model against the standard unitary model where a couple behaves as a single decision maker. The model is applied to a sample drawn from the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CEX) whereby we explicitly focus on expenses on children's goods that act as a public good in the spouses' preferences. We find that for couples with two or three children the standard unitary model is strongly rejected in favor of our non-cooperative model. Moreover, it turns out that for the majority of these couples, there is a Wife Dictatorship in the sense that the spending pattern is according to her preferences.consumption, labor supply, intra-household allocation, non-cooperative model, public goods

Persuasion in Experimental Ultimatum Games

This paper experimentally studies persuasion effects in ultimatum games and finds that Proposers\u27 payoffs significantly increase if, along with offers, they can send messages which Responders read before their acceptance decision. Higher payoffs are due to higher acceptance rates as well as more aggressive offers by Proposers