"Joop" (Joost) Hartog (born in Sliedrecht, the Netherlands, on June 29, 1946)[1] is a Dutch economist and an Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Amsterdam.

[7] A native of Sliedrecht, Joop Hartog studied at the Netherlands School of Economics (1964–70) and at Queen's University, Kingston, where he earned a M.A.

[13] Finally, in work with Pedro T. Pereira and Jose A.C. Vieira, he finds returns to education in Portugal to have increased during the 1980s and early 1990s, especially since its accession to the European Union in 1986, though the returns to education grew most at the upper part of the wage distribution, thus also explaining part of the increase in Portuguese wage inequality in the 1980s.

[15] Together with Coen Teulings, Hartog has leveraged his research on wage behaviour to develop a theory why non-competitive wage differentials are smaller in a corporatist system than in a decentralized system, arguing that corporatist institutions provide a solutions to the hold-up problem of investments by specifying ex ante contracts that remove the need for labour market parties to bargain ex post over the use of the employment relationship's economic surplus.

Cramer and Mirjam van Praag, he moreover finds evidence that individuals with low risk aversion are more likely to be or become entrepreneurs.