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...

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...

Over the last two decades, communication has become an increasingly importantaspect of monetary policy. These real-world developments have spawned a huge newscholarly literature on central bank communicationmostly empirical, and almost all of it written in this decade. We survey this...

This paper analyses the impact of loan market competition on the interest rates applied by euro area banks to loans and deposits during the 1994-2004 period, using a novel measure of competition called the Boone indicator. We find evidence that stronger competition implies significantly lower...

Familiarity with working in a specific institutional environment compared to its competitors can provide a firm with a competitive advantage, making it invest in specific host countries. We examine whether this notion of institutional competitive advantage drives banks to seek out specific...

This paper provides new evidence on individual preferences over annuities and lump sum payments based on hypothetical questions posed in the DNB Household Survey in 2005. Contrary to the majority of papers in the annuitization puzzle literature, this study allows to control explicitly for the...

This study presents an overview of the main characteristics of the CentERpanel as well as of the DNB Household Survey, a longitudinal database of economic and psychological aspects of financial behaviour of Dutch households run at CentERdata, Tilburg University and sponsored by De Nederlandsche...

This study investigates whether individual choices in the pension domain are vulnerable to the way alternatives are communicated to respondents. The analysis is based on a set of hypothetical questions posed in the DNB House-hold Survey as well as in the RAND American Life Panel on pension...