At the beginning of this century the Dutch government controlled the opium market in the Dutch East Indies--nowadays Indonesia--for several decades. This state monopoly was called the opiumregie. Using information gathered during the opiumregie, this paper estimates price elasticities of opium consumption. It appears that short-term price elasticities of opium use are about -0.7. Long-term price elasticities are about -1.0.

In this article we investigate the disincentive effects of shortening the potential duration of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits. We identify these disincentive effects by exploiting changes in Slovenia’s unemployment insurance system—a “natural experiment” that involved substantial reductions in the potential duration of benefits for four groups of workers plus no change in benefits for another group (which served as a natural control). We find that the change had a positive effect on the exit rate from unemployment—to new jobs and other options—for unemployment spells of various lengths and for several categories of unemployed workers.

Expert Opinion and Compensation: Evidence from a Musical Competition by Victor A. Ginsburgh and Jan C. van Ours. Published in volume 93, issue 1, pages 289-296 of American Economic Review, March 2003

The Declining Price Anomaly in Dutch Dutch Rose Auctions by Gerard J. van den Berg, Jan C. van Ours and Menno P. Pradhan. Published in volume 91, issue 4, pages 1055-1062 of American Economic Review, September 2001