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...

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 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...

We introduce heterogeneous expectations in a standard housing market model linking housing rental levels to fundamental buying prices. Using quarterly data we estimate the model parameters for eight different countries, US, UK, NL, JP, CH, ES, SE and BE. We find that the data support...

This paper empirically investigates if insurers exhibited a flight home or flight to quality during the European sovereign debt crisis and other stages of the financial crisis. Our dataset consists of over sixty insurance companies, for which we separately observe trading behaviour and portfolio...

This paper assesses the determinants of market impact costs of institutional equity trades, using unique data from the world's second largest pension fund. We allow the impact of trade characteristics and market conditions on trading costs to depend on the level of trading costs itself and...

Often, a relatively small group of trades causes the major part of the trading costs on an investment portfolio. For the equity trades studied in this paper, executed by the world's second largest pension fund, we find that only 10% of the trades determines 75% of total market impact costs....

This report analyses the portfolio behaviour of Dutch households. The study is partly based on information from a broad survey commissioned by the Nederlandsche Bank, held in March of this year. The investigation shows that risk bearing elements are becoming more and more important in households...

Diversification by banks affects the systemic risk of the sector. Importantly, Wagner (2010) shows that linear diversification increases systemic risk. We consider the case of securitization, whereby loan portfolios are sliced into tranches with different seniority levels. We show that tranching...