The euro banknotes recently celebrated their 4th year anniversary (2002 - 2006)! DNB has monitored the Dutch public's acceptance of the euro banknotes through surveys in 2002, 2003 and 2005, contrasting its findings with those for the former guilder notes as well as the results of other recent...

Developers of new banknotes can optimise banknote design by making use of public feedback, strategic communication policy, a design philosophy and the stakeholders' approach reflected in a Programme of Requirements. The synthesis of these four elements will lead to new design concepts for...

The model of Stiglitz and Weiss ( American Economic Review , 1981, 71(3)) is the seminal analytical work on credit rationing. However, in a recent paper, Arnold and Riley ( American Economic Review , 2009, 99(5)) claim that the distributional assumption on which that model.s main result depends...

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...

Using a measure of competition based on the Panzar-Rosse model, this paper explains bank competition across 76 countries on the basis of various determinants. Studies explaining banking competition are rare and typically insuffciently robust as they are based on a limited number of countries...

The lack of available prices in the Dutch life insurance industry makes competition an elusive concept that defies direct observation. Therefore, this paper investigates competition by analysing several factors which may affect the competitive nature of a market and various indirect measurement...

This paper demonstrates that the level of competition in the existing Panzar Rosse (P-R) literature is systematically overestimated and that the tests on both monopoly and perfect competition are distorted. This is due to the use of bank revenues divided by total assets as dependent variable in...

Over the past few decades, the worldwide banking industry has undergone strong consolidation. As a result, the number of banks has fallen sharply. At the same time, the size of the largest banks has increased substantially, both in absolute figures and relative to the size of smaller banks. This...

The recent wave of mergers and acquisitions in the European banking sector has raised concerns that bank profitability will rise because of less competitive market conditions. This paper analyses the relationship between concentration, competitiveness, efficiency and profitability in the...