This study examines the emergence of financial stability as a key police objective. It discusses the underlying trends in the financial system, as well as the role of finance in relation to money, the real economy and public policy. Financial stability is defined in terms of its ability to help...

By proposing a measure for cross-market rebalancing effects, we provide new insights into the different sources of currency crises. We address three interrelated questions: (i) How can we best capture contagion; (ii) Is the contagion of currency crisis a regional or global phenomenon?; and (iii)...

In this paper, we analyze the business cycle behavior of home mortgages and consumer credit and investigate whether the observed changes. and in particular observed changes in the comovement between the loan variables and real activity. are likely to be caused by changes in financial markets. We...

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...

We present new evidence on financial literacy and retirement preparation in the Netherlands based on two surveys conducted before and after the onset of the financial crisis. We document that while financial knowledge did not increase from 2005 to 2010, significantly more individuals planned for...

What is the role of micro and macro factors in determining house prices? We address this question empirically by analysing survey data on housing and mortgages from the DNB Household Survey for the period 1993-2009. We focus on the determinants of house owners' subjective assessment of the value...

Extreme losses are the major concern in risk management. The dependence between financial assets and the market portfolio changes under extremely adverse market conditions. We develop a measure of systematic tail risk, the tail regression beta , defined by an asset's sensitivity to large...

This paper is the first that formally compares investment risk taking by pension funds and insurance firms. Using a unique and extended dataset that covers the volatile investment period 1995-2009, we find that, in the Netherlands, insurers take substantially less investment risk than pension...

This paper empirically investigates international equity investors' foreign portfolios before and during the financial crisis by estimating a gravity model for 22 source and 42 destination countries. The results show that international stock market diversification provides large gains during the...

Developed countries apply different security mechanisms in regulation to protect defined pension benefits: solvency requirements, a pension guarantee fund, and sponsor support. We test the performance of these mechanisms in terms of the protection offered to pension benefits in relation to the...