As an assistant professor in Economics I devote half of my time to teaching activities and half of my time to research activities. My research mainly concerns economics of education. Questions that I address center around the improvement of student and school achievement. I also investigate what achievement tests in schools actually measure: only cognitive abilities or are non-cognitive abilities also picked up by these tests? And how well do achievement tests predict future school success and later life outcomes? I perform this research within the team of education economists at Maastricht University.Within the Kaans Education Research group at our department, we gather data on the school performance and background of students aged between 3 and 15 years in all school in Limburg, the Netherlands. With this data we provide feedback to schools in how their student population looks and how the students perform (in line with the expecations based on the social background or not) and how they do in comparison to other schools. We also analyze how social-emotional skills are related to school performance at different ages.

As a Post-doctoral researcher I worked on the research project "The distribution of responsibility for social security: a comparative study". For this project I closely co-operated with international experts in the field of labor market institutions. The results of this research are forthcoming in an internationally published book (by Edward Elgar), expected by the end of 2009.

As a researcher at the Institute of Labour Studies I worked at a project on the scarring effects of unemployment. This resulted in a report for the Ministry of Social Affairs.

As a Ph.D. Student I worked on my thesis on early retirement patterns in Europe. I succesfully defended my thesis December 14, 2005.