Since the beginnings of the eighties house prices in the Netherlands haveincreased steadily and considerably. In this paper we study the effect of this developmenton the demand for second mortgages and on the savings of Dutch households. We use the dataof the Dutch socio-economic panel for the...

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in the <I>Journal of Environmental Economics & Management</I>, 2009, 58, 27-42.<P> The literature that tests for U-shaped relationships using panel data, such as those between pollution and income or inequality and growth, reports widely divergent...</p></i>