This paper examines the response of the economies of 11 EU countries, Japan, and the United States to shocks in housing and equity prices. The effects are assessed with a Structural Vector Auto Regressive (SVAR) model, and four key findings emerge. First, the impacts of asset price shocks are...

This study is an introduction to and summary of the 2002 Annual Meeting papers of the Royal Netherlands Economic Association. The general theme of this year's Annual Meeting is 'The role of wealth in the economy'. It is covered by 5 papers, which address the following topics: (i) household...

This paper explores the importance of wealth effects for monetary policy in the context of the policy strategy of the European Central Bank (ECB). Causality tests indicate that nominal equity prices have predictive power for ECB policy indicators of real activity, while housing prices have...

This paper reviews some puzzling economic aspects of globalisation and argues that they cannot be satisfactorily addressed in perfectly or monopolistically competitive models. Drawing on recent work, a model of oligopoly in general equilibrium is sketched. The model ensures theoretical...

They are not well-behaved. The main problem is that one cannot control the radius of convergence when using perturbation techniques. Just outside the radius of convergence, higher-order approximations can easily behave extremely badly, and even within the radius of convergence one can expect...

Besides the theoretical (Alchian/Klein, 1973) case for including asset prices in measures of inflation, there is also a practical case, that some asset prices, notably housing, are closely associated with the main trends in inflation, and via 'bubbles and busts' with output disturbances....

The debate over including asset prices in the construction of an inflation statistic has attracted renewed attention in recent years. Virtually all of this (and earlier) work on incorporating asset prices into an aggregate price statistic has been motivated by a presumed, but unidentified...

Recently, it has often been argued that globalization eases the job of central banks as it helps to tame inflation. This is used to argue that central banks (particularly the ECB, referring to the objectives as laid down in the EU-Treaty) could or should reduce their efforts in the fight against...

In card payment systems, no-surcharge rules prohibit merchants from charging consumers extra for card payments. However, Dutch retailers are allowed to surcharge consumers for their debit card use. This allows an empirical analysis of the impact of surcharging on the demand for debit card...

This paper investigates competition in the Dutch non-life insurance industry indirectly by measuring scale economies and X-inefficiency, assuming that strong competition would force insurance firms to exploit unused scale economies and to push down inefficiencies. We observe substantial...