This paper considers a government auctioning off multiple licenses to firms who compete in a market after the auction. Firms have different costs, and cost efficiency is private information at the auction stage and the market competition stage. If only one license is auctioned, standard results...

Where markets are insufficiently competitive, governments can intervene by auctioning licenses to operate or by forcing divestitures. The Dutch government has done exactly that, organizing auctions to redistribute tenancy rights for high- way gasoline stations and forcing the divestiture of...

In the process of regulatory reform in the electric power industry, the mitigation of market power is one of the basic problems regulators have to deal with. We use experimental data to study the sources of market power with supply function competition, akin to the competition in wholesale...

This paper analyzes adjustments in the Dutch retail gasoline prices. We estimate an error correction model on changes in the daily retail price for gasoline (taxes excluded) for the period 1996-2004 taking care of volatility clustering by estimating an EGARCH model. It turns out the volatility...

This paper studies asymmetric price responses of individual firms, via daily retail prices of almost all gasoline stations in the Netherlands and suggested prices of the five largest oil companies over more than two years. I find that 38% of the stations respond asymmetrically to changes in the...

In the early 1990s, the Dutch social partners agreed upon transforming the generous and actuarially unfair PAYG early retirement schemes into less generous and actuarially fair capital funded schemes. The starting dates of the transitional arrangements varied by industry sector. In this study,...

We study a mixed hitting-time (MHT) model that specifies durations as the first time a Lévy process— a continuous-time process with stationary and independent increments— crosses a heterogeneous threshold. Such models are of substantial interest because they can be reduced from...

This paper studies the interaction between job mobility and housing mobility by considering the duration of commutes. Conventional models assume that the employrnent location has priority over the residentiallocation and that the latter is adapted to the former. This implies that the duration of...

In a large class of hazard models with proportional unobserved heterogeneity, the distribution of the heterogeneity among survivors converges to a gamma distribution. This convergence is often rapid. We derive this result as a general result for exponential mixtures and explore its implications...

In housing markets with asymmetric information list prices may signal unobserved properties of the house or the seller. Asymmetric information is the starting point of many models for the housing market. In this paper, we estimate the causal effect of list-price reductions to test for the...