My favorite papers

Here I mention the papers I am particularly proud of and would like others to know about. They are not necessarily my best cited papers nor the best published. This is my TOP 5!

  1. "Rewarding behavior with a sweet food strengthens its valuation" (2021), with Jan Bauer, Marina Schroeder, Martina Vecchi, Tina Blake, Suzanne Dickson, Plos One, 16(4): e0242461.

This is a joint study with neurobiologists. We show that if you reward a child with a sweet food (as opposed to giving it "for free"), the child valuates more subsequently. The take-away from this is that saying to your child "You will get an ice cream if you eat your vegetables" may contribute to him/her liking the ice cream more over time...


  1. "Providing Advice to job Seekers at Low Cost: An Experimental Study on Online Advice" (2019), with Philipp Kircher and Paul Muller, Review of Economic Studies 86(4), 1411–1447

In this paper we designed an intervention aimed at providing advice to job seekers about what occupations they could be looking for. The advice is based on historical transitions we observe in administrative data. We find that the intervention affects how people search for jobs and increases the number of interviews they get.


  1. “Cognitive Racial Discrimination” (2015), Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology and Economics 8(3), 173-85

This is an experimental study where I show that racial discrimination can arise because of difficulties we have in re-identifying people of other races. This mechanism could also contribute to sorting, for reasons that have nothing to do with preferences or meeting frictions.


  1. "Friendships and Favoritism at School: Evidence from the Field" (2011), with Jeroen van de Ven, Economic Journal 121 (557), 1228-1251.

This was one of my first experiments in the field. We show that children are more likely to pick their friend in an effort task, and are prepared to trade-off a large amount of productivity to do so.


  1. "Do Teacher Strikes Harm Student Achievement?”", with Dinand Webbink (2010), Labour, Review of Labour Economics and Industrial Relations, 24(4), 391-406.

This paper evaluates the effects of a 6-months strike in higher education in Belgium (that affected me!) on educational outcomes. Interestingly, we had a hard time publishing the paper because of external validity - when and where could we ever be in a situation where children don't go to school for such a long period. That was pre-Covid. The paper's citations have jumped suddenly in 2020...