We investigate four sources of uncertainty with CPB’s macroeconomic model SAFFIER: provisional data, exogenous variables, model parameters and residuals of behavioural equations. Uncertainty is an inherent attribute of any forecast. We apply a Monte Carlo simulation technique to...

The Lisbon strategy could reinvigorate Europe's economy and boost employment. In 2000 the European leaders agreed to stimulate economic growth and employment and make Europe's economy the most competitive in the world. Read also the accompanying <a href="http://www.cpb.nl/node/13365">press release</a>. If Europe would really reach the...

We investigate the trade-off between employment and labour productivity in a panel of OECD countries in 1970-2003. The endogeneity of employment is shown to matter crucially for assessing its effect on productivity. Estimating a structural model with 3SLS, where employment depends on...

The Great Recession has caused unemployment in the Netherlands to rise from 3.1% in 2008 to over 7% at the beginning of 2014. Structural imbalances caused by labour mismatch could be one of the explanations underlying this high rate. The goal of this paper is to examine this hypothesis. We...

In Europe, neither unemployment rates nor institutions are uniform. In the EMU, countries have coordinated their monetary policy, and fiscal policy might follow. Does convergence in fiscal policy imply that unemployment rates will converge, too, or is diversified fiscal policy desirable? An...

Employment protection is a hotly debated topic. In this document we review the theoretical and empirical studies on the impact of employment protection. Subsequently, we confront the findings of these studies with the Dutch setup, and consider a number of reform options.

Independent national fiscal institutions can play a major role in fiscal policy and in maintaining and restoring sustainability of a country's public finance. This paper describes the role of CPB in Dutch fiscal policy and discusses its merits and risks. And to what extent can it provide...

We apply a robust method to the estimation of Impulse Response Functions (IRFs) to paneldata for 99 countries for the period 1974-2001. There is a lively debate on the persistence of the current banking crisis’ impact on output. IRFs estimated by Cerra and Saxena (2008) suggest that these...

Over the course of the past few years, too much credit has been made available worldwide, due to financial innovation, overly optimistic expectations and loophole-ridden regulation. Regulatory supervisors have failed because they were unable to prevent this situation. Things took a bad turn...

This research compares systemic risk in the banking sector, the insurance sector, the construction sector, and the food sector. To measure systemic risk, we use extreme negative returns in stock market data for a time-varying panel of the 20 largest U.S. firms in each sector. We find that...