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...

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...

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...

This paper is the first detailed and world-wide investigation of the developments in banking competition during the past fifteen years. Using the Panzar-Rosse approach, we establish significant changes over time in the competitiveness of the banking industry. The changes in competition over time...

In two-sided markets, one widely observes skewed pricing strategies, in which the price mark-up is much higher on one side of the market than the other. Using a simple model of two-sided markets, we show that, under constant elasticity of demand, skewed pricing is indeed pro?t maximizing. The...

Using a simple model of two-sided markets, we show that, in the social optimum, platform pricing leads to an inherent cost recovery problem. This result is driven by the positive externality of participation that users on either side of the market exert on the opposite side. The contribution of...

In this paper we present a theoretic framework to analyse pricing structures in debit card schemes. Card-holders value debit cards only to the extent that these are accepted by retailers, while retailers in turn benefit from a widespread usage of cards. This points to the two-sided nature of the...

In the first part of this article we present a brief description of Dutch retail payment systems in terms of market structure and performance, usage of payment instruments, and corresponding tariff structures. Although it is con-cluded that the Dutch retail payment market as a whole showed...

This paper brings to the forefront the assumptions that we make when focussingon a particular type of explanation for bank profitability. We evaluate a broad field of research by introducing a general framework for a profit maximizing bank and demonstrate how different types of models can be...