I use large administrative datasets and quasi-experimental designs to study how place, policy and opportunity shape labour market and criminal behaviour.
Research interests
Crime economics
Labour economics
Housing & neighbourhoods
Economic history
Applied microeconometrics
Work in progress
Drafts are preliminary — please do not cite or circulate without asking first.
Work in progress · 2026
Staying to opportunity: the effects of better neighbourhoods on incumbent residents
Neighbourhoods shape economic and life outcomes. Existing research relies on selective residential moves to identify neighbourhood effects. We study these effects using a plausibly exogenous change in composition induced by the Rotterdam Wet, a policy barring workless individuals with less than six years of residency in the region from moving into selected disadvantaged neighbourhoods. The policy also displaced targeted areas' residents meeting the work and tenure criteria at lease renewal. In targeted neighbourhoods, the policy led to a persistent increase in the share of employed residents and a decrease in welfare recipiency and criminal involvement, driven by changes in the type of entrants. We observe a behavioural response among incumbent residents, who increase their employment and decrease their welfare participation and criminal behaviour. Exploiting the sharp discontinuity in policy applicability at the six-year residency threshold, we show that incumbent residents react to the displacement threat by exiting welfare and informal work to take up formal employment. Future analyses exploiting street-level data will establish the role of local peer composition on labour outcomes and criminal offences.
Work in progress · 2026
They took our crimes: resolving the immigration-crime puzzle
Immigration is known not to causally affect crime. Despite this, individuals with a migration background are highly overrepresented in prisons. We propose a framework reconciling these two facts. Causal estimates of immigration on crime mask heterogeneity in the effects. Leveraging detailed administrative data and two distinct research designs, we show that immigration leads to a substitution between natives and immigrants in local crime markets whereas the overall criminal activity is unchanged. We are able to rule out discrimination as an alternative mechanism.
Work in progress · 2026
Peer effects in voting: historical evidence from extending the franchise
Does extending the right to vote change the economic position of those who gain it? We study the Dutch franchise extensions of 1850, 1887 and 1896, which raised the share of enfranchised men from roughly ten to close to fifty per cent. Eligibility was tied to tax thresholds that varied across municipalities, which lets us compare households just above and just below the local cut-off in a stacked fuzzy regression discontinuity design. We combine a digitised historical income panel of Dutch households covering 1860 to 1920 with electoral registers recording exactly who obtained the right to vote. We use this setting to ask whether enfranchisement raised the incomes of new voters and of their neighbours, and to examine the mechanisms at work: the socio-economic composition of elected officials, municipal spending on public goods, and the bargaining position of newly represented occupations.