Research

Peer-reviewed publications


Permanent nursing home (NH) admissions are a frequent and major life event aimed at maintaining quality of life in old age. Yet, insights into the impact of a NH admission on well-being are scarce and inconclusive. We evaluate the effect of a NH admission on domains of well-being among those who are admitted using event study methodology for cross-sections combined with inverse probability weighting. We apply this doubly robust approach to Dutch survey data on well-being linked to extensive administrative data on NH admissions, health, and socio-economic status. We find that a NH admission leads to a temporary increase in loneliness, the risk of anxiety and depression, and a loss of control over one's life. However, these scores revert to pre-admission levels after 6 months. These findings may contribute to better-informed individual-level and policy decisions about potential NH entry and aging in place policies.


Having children can result in large earnings penalties for mothers. Using extensive administrative data from the Netherlands, we assess the magnitude and drivers of the effects of first childbirth on parents’ earnings trajectories in the Netherlands. We show that mothers’ earnings are 46% lower compared to their pre-birth earnings trajectory, whereas fathers’ earnings are unaffected by child birth. We examine the role of two potential determinants of the unequal distribution of parents’ labour market costs by gender: childcare policies and gender norms. We find that while child care availability is correlated with lower child penalty, the immediate short-term causal effect of increasing child care availability on the earnings penalty of becoming a mother is small. By taking advantage of variation in gender norms in different population groups, we show that gender norms are strongly correlated with child penalty for mothers.

Media coverage: De Correspondent


Unexpected negative health shocks of a parent may reduce adult children’s labour supply via informal caregiving and stress-induced mental health problems. We link administrative data on labour market outcomes, hospitalisations and family relations for the full Dutch working age population for the years 1999-2008 to evaluate the effect of an unexpected parental hospitalisation on the probability of employment and on conditional earnings. Using an event study difference-in-differences model combined with coarsened exact matching and individual fixed effects, we find no effect of an unexpected parental hos- pitalisation on either employment or earnings for Dutch men and women, and neither for the full population nor for the subpopulations most likely to become caregivers. These find- ings suggest that the extensive public coverage of formal long-term care in the Netherlands combined with widespread acceptance of part-time work provides sufficient opportunities to deal with adverse health events of family members without having to compromise one’s labour supply.

Work in progress

  • The effect of inappropriate benzodiazepine treatment on long-term health and labor market outcomes with Pieter Bakx and Fabrizio Mazzonna

  • Can gender norms explain the child penalty?

There are substantial gender gaps in earnings once children are born in many developed countries, despite similar education levels of men and women and accessible child care facilities. I examine whether gender norms are a driver of women's higher labour market costs of having children using Dutch administrative data. Exploiting large local variation in gender norms in the Netherlands, I compare parents from the Dutch bible belt, where the concentration of orthodox protestants is high, with parents of other regions in the Netherlands. My findings show that having children leads to one-fourth larger earnings decrease for women in the bible belt, mainly driven by a larger hours reduction. As pre-child parental characteristics and institutions such as child care availability are the same for both groups of parents, I argue that the most plausible explanation for this finding are different prevailing gender norms in these two areas.

Media coverage: De Correspondent

Miscarriages occur in about 15 percent of recognised pregnancies and often cause grief, stress, or guilt, and may result in mental health declines for both the woman and her partner. We identify around 11'000 miscarriages and link them to Dutch administrative data on health insurance expenditure, prescription drugs, labour market outcomes and family links from 2009 to 2018. Miscarriages are largely random among pregnant women conditional on age. Hence, we use two types of event study models to estimate the effect of a miscarriage on mental health care use, labour market and family outcomes: one for miscarriages without control group, and one with women with a completed pregnancy as a control group. We find that in the year of the first miscarriage, women increase their use of therapy, whereas there is no effect on the mental health care use of the partners. Labour market outcomes are unaffected by a miscarriage once subsequent fertility is taken into account. Couple separation probabilities do not change after a miscarriage compared to women with a completed pregnancy. A better understanding of the high frequency of miscarriages and potential accompanying mental health issues may help to reduce the stigma attached to both miscarriages and mental health problems and may facilitate the activation of people's support network to deal with the loss.

Other publications