From a macroeconomic point of view, Dutch households are in a basically sound financial position.Nevertheless, at a microeconomic level substantial financial risks may exist. This report presents a profile of the most vulnerable households with special attention to the mortgage debt/house value...

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....

This paper provides a survey on recent developments in the European banking industry. Traditional banking activities have contracted in relative terms, but banks remain the predomination players in the euro area financial system. Economic and monetary integration in the EU has strongly...

To what extent was the credit contraction during the global financial crisis due to more intense screening and monitoring by banks? We address this question by analyzing changes in the structure of a large number of syndicated loans to private, non-financial corporations. We find an increase in...

Simultaneous bank defaults are often attributed to interbank contagion, but can also be due to common shocks affecting banks with similar balance sheets. We disentangle both effects by realising that if financial markets expect a bank's default to be contagious, an increase in this bank's...

The global financial crisis has reignited the debate about the risks of financial globalization, in particular the international transmission of financial shocks. We use data on individual loans by the largest international banks to their various countries of operation to examine whether banks'...

This paper analyses competition in the professions, paying attention to the consequences for the price level and price differentiation in particular. This is relevant not only for the evaluation of competition policy, but also for monetary policy. If enhancing competition is successful, it may...

We show how simple statistical techniques for capturing critical transitions used in natural sciences, fail to capture economic regime shifts. This implies that we need to use model-based approaches to identify critical transitions. We apply a heterogenous agents model in a standard housing...

How does a fall in house prices affect real activity? This paper presents a business cycle model in which a decline in house prices reduces geographical mobility, creating distortions in the labor market. This happens because homeowners face declines in their home equity levels, after which it...

This paper provides a discussion of the `housing market' channels of the monetarytransmission mechanism (MTM) and offers some evidence on institutional differences in the European housing and mortgage markets. Using a number of VAR models, estimated individually for nine European countries over...