Uncovering willful ignorance
In order to make sustainable decisions, individuals need to consider the (negative) consequences of their actions. At times, people prefer to be willful ignorant about such consequences. We will conduct a meta analysis on willful ignorance to assess how common it is, and which factors help mitigate it.

Air travel and climate policies: Exploring distributional effects, environmental outcomes, and public support
The objective of this project is to study air travel policies aiming at mitigating the impact of aviation on climate change. The project will mix theoretical and empirical methods to assess the effectiveness of alternative policy instruments, their distributive implications, their impact on consumers' surplus, and perception by the public.

Measuring information avoidance in sustainable decision-making
Consumers underutilise ethical information (e.g., labor conditions; environmental impact) in their purchases compared to their surveyed intentions. Larger price premiums on sustainability may trigger ethical information avoidance. This project will examine how price differences frame ethical information-seeking, to characterise the attentional patterns that promote or undermine sustainable choice.

Mind the gap: Can wage transparency help close the gender pay gap?
This project sheds light on the role of transparency in decreasing the gender wage gap through negotiations. We first study the effects of a German wage transparency law. To investigate the mechanisms that link information about peers to negotiations outcomes, we combine this with a laboratory experiment that focuses on the interaction of peer performance and compensation.

Forecasting climate extremes with deep learning
Climate extremes cause enormous losses to the human society and the planet. The project will develop the state-of-the-art deep learning technology for recognising the predictive patterns of extreme climate indicators. Our novel tools are valuable for managing and understanding the extreme risk of climate changes.

Role models and children’s aspirations
Meeting and interacting with successful individuals might push children's believes about their potential and future life opportunities. This project evaluates whether the exposure of disadvantaged children to meetings with role models sharing a similar childhood background has the potential to foster children’s self-confidence, aspirations, and academic engagement.  

Fertility restrictions and intergenerational mobility: The role of treatment effect heterogeneity in the child quantity-quality tradeoff
Low intergenerational mobility undermines opportunities to escape poverty and causes inequalities to persist across generations. Understanding what reduces intergeneration mobility is essential for achieving a sustainable society. This project will study how the One-Child Policy, which imposed strict fertility restrictions on everyone in China, contributes to China’s decreasing intergeneration mobility.

Optimising school facilities in Timor Leste
Together with the World Bank we developed a mathematical model to optimise the planning and budgeting for health facilities in developing countries. In this new project we will extend this model to school facilities and write a scientific paper on this model.

Can consumers learn the value of ambiguous eco-labels?
This project aims to study possible implications and solutions for the problem of 'green-washing'. We aim to determine if consumers learn about the quality of a label in simple conditions (and how long does it take them). These results will shed light on how future policy should address this problem.

Tax progressivity over the life cycle
How successful is the tax system in reducing inequality? Common measures of tax progressivity are based on a static comparison of before-tax and after-tax income. However, income varies greatly over the lifecycle. This project attempts to calculate and analyse measures of tax progressivity that take these lifecycle considerations into account.

The effects of the European carbon trading system and its transition towards an auction based system - evidence from Dutch microdata
The European Emissions Trading System is the EU's main policy instrument to reduce the industrial emission of greenhouse gases. With this project we analyze its effects on emissions, employment and profitability among Dutch companies. We additionally analyse a key design issue, namely the allocation of certificates.

Salience avoidance and sustainable behaviour
The information that is on top of our mind is the one that most influence our decisions. But do people realize that this is the case? For example, do they realise that if they distract from information related to the Sustainable Development Goals, they are less likely to behave sustainably? And if people are aware of the effects of distractions on their behaviour, do they actively seek this distraction not to feel guilty about their actions?

Sustainability, collective action, and resources: Lessons learned from the history of Dutch water management
In 2015, the United Nations formulated 17 Sustainable Development Goals. To mitigate the potential effects of global humanitarian crises, we need a better understanding of collective action problems. This project aims to develop a framework on the role and management of resources in collective action problems by analysing the history of water management in the Netherlands.