Financial conglomerates, combining banking, securities trading, and insurance, have become an important part of the financial landscape in many countries. Cross-sector consolidation has been fostered by trends such as disintermediation, globalization, and deregulation creating new challenges for...

This paper measures the 'blurring of distinctions' phenomenon in an innovative way, namely by means of a breakdown of the revenues of the 50 largest financial groups worldwide. These data show that the blurring of distinctions between financial intermediaries of different nationalities (i.e....

Traditional theory suggests that high franchise value limits bank risk-taking incentives. Then why did many banks with exceptionally valuable franchises get exposed to new financial instruments, resulting in significant losses during the crisis? This paper attempts to reconcile theory and...

There is an ongoing debate whether firm focus creates or destroys shareholder value. Earlierliterature has shown significant diversification discounts: firms that engage in multiple activitiesare valued less. Various factors are important in the size of the discount, for example...

This paper discusses the method of comonotonicity to estimate the sum of risks. Two applications are presented. First, we estimate a property insurer.s exposure to claims after a severe storm. Second, we apply our approach to a pension fund.s investment risk to estimate the prospective total...

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 discusses the valuation of wage-indexed pension fund liabilities. Valuation by replication with market instruments is typically not possible as there are no wage-indexed assets. This paper discusses several methods to find a value in such incomplete markets and advocates utility-based...

In the wake of the financial crisis, several countries are to ban commission payments to improve the quality of financial advice. This paper investigates the potential impact of commission bans on the source and quality of financial advice. To this end, we extend Inderst and Ottaviani's (2012)...

In this paper various Value-at-Risk techniques are applied tot the Dutch stock market index AEX and to the Dow Jones Industrial Average. the main conclusions are: (1) Changing volatility over time is the most important characteristic of stock returns when modelling value-at-risk; (2) For high...

In recent years, several European Union member states have modified the institutional design offinancial supervision. These reforms pose the question which considerations have led to the different models chosen in these countries. We analyse the considerations in the Netherlands leading to the...