The overall costs of the payment system to society are considerable. These costs depend on the relative usage of the available payment instruments, which differ in the costs that each entails to market participants in the payment chain. In the Netherlands, debit card payments have become less...

Do consumers change their payment behaviour after being exposed to a public campaign that encourages them to use their debit cards more often? We analyse the impact of such a campaign that started in 2007, using weekly debit card transaction data between 2005 and 2013. The overall results show...

This article surveys arguments on the lack of innovative capacity of the Dutch economy as presented by Kleinknecht in several papers. The arguments are critically discussed and in addition an alternative way to calculate productivity figures is presented. The authors conclude that the hypothesis...

We examine whether Fitch support ratings of US banks depend on bank size. Using quarterly data for the period 2004:Q4 to 2012:Q4 and controlling for several factors that make large and small banks different, we find that bank size is positively related to support ratings. However, the effect is...

This paper analyses the reforms in the architecture of EMU since the eruption of the euro crisis in 2010. We describe major weaknesses in the original set-up of EMU, such as lack of fiscal discipline, diverging financial cycles and competitiveness positions, and a lack of crisis instruments....

In this study we disentangle two dimensions of banks' systemic risk: the level of bank tail risk and the linkage between a bank's tail risk and severe shocks in the financial system. We employ a measure of the systemic risk of financial institutions that can be decomposed into two subcomponents...

This paper examines how credit risk affects bank lending and the business cycle. We estimate a panel Vector Autoregression model for an unbalanced sample of 12 OECD countries over the past two to three decades, consisting of the output gap, inflation, the short-term interest rate, bank lending,...

Using a novel way to identify relationship and transaction banks, we study how banks' lending techniques affect funding to SMEs over the business cycle. For 21 countries we link the lending techniques that banks use in the direct vicinity of firms to these firms' credit constraints at two...

This paper reviews studies exploring how higher bank capital requirements affect economic growth. There is little evidence of a direct effect; research focuses on the indirect effects of capital requirements on credit supply, bank asset risk, and cost of bank capital, which in turn can affect...

This paper brings to the forefront the assumptions that we make when focussingon a particular type of explanation for bank profitability. We evaluate a broad field of research by introducing a general framework for a profit maximizing bank and demonstrate how different types of models can be...