German metropolitan areas with more highly skilled workers became increasingly skilled between 1975 and 2003, and this has important implications for urban employment growth.Using for the first time German metropolitan areas instead of administrative regions we show that the share of college...

Cross-country regressions suggest that urbanization and FDI are important drivers of growth However, it is not clear that primacy eventually hurts growth performance. Since it is tough to interpret cross-country growth regressions, we provide detailed evidence on the determinants of outward FDI...

There are numerous ways to indicate the degree of banking competition across countries. Antitrust authorities rely on the structure-conduct-performance paradigm while academics prefer price mark-ups (Lerner index) or correlations of input costs with output prices (H-statistic). These measures...

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...

Using U.S. quarterly data we provide VAR evidence showing that a positive productivity shock leads to a persistent decrease in the unemployment rate and in the price markup, together with an increase in aggregate profits. In response to the shock the labor share of income decreases on impact and...

The provision of retail payment services is complex with many participants engaging in a series of interrelated bilateral transactions and subject to large economies of scale and scope along with strong adoption, usage and network externalities. This makes sound public policy difficult. We focus...

We consider debit and credit card networks. Our contribution is to introduce the role of consumer credit into these payment networks, and to assess the way this affects competition and equilibrium fees. We analyze a situation in which overdrafts are associated with current accounts and debit...

In this article we empirically analyze how the Tourist Test methodology affects the level of multilateral interchange fees (MIFs) for debit card payments over time. Using Dutch cost data for 2002 and 2009 we argue that this method leads to rising cost for merchants in the long run. The outcomes...

This paper investigates the cost efficiency and competitive behaviour of the non-life - or property and casualty - insurance market in the Netherlands over the period 1995-2012. We focus on the 2006 health care reform, where public health care insurance has been included in the non-life...

The rapid proliferation of electronic payment media continues to change the way consumers shop and merchants sell goods and services. Many policymakers and economists agree that the digitization of payments is socially beneficial. However, there is considerable debate regarding the optimal...