From a macroeconomic point of view, Dutch households are in a basically sound financial position.Nevertheless, at a microeconomic level substantial financial risks may exist. This report presents a profile of the most vulnerable households with special attention to the mortgage debt/house value...

An empirical investigation of the relationship between market share or concentration and return on equity or assets provides evidence for the existence of a profit-structure relationship in the European banking sector. Testing several market-power and efficient-structure theories reveals that...

We show how simple statistical techniques for capturing critical transitions used in natural sciences, fail to capture economic regime shifts. This implies that we need to use model-based approaches to identify critical transitions. We apply a heterogenous agents model in a standard housing...

We introduce heterogeneous expectations in a standard housing market model linking housing rental levels to fundamental buying prices. Using quarterly data we estimate the model parameters for eight different countries, US, UK, NL, JP, CH, ES, SE and BE. We find that the data support...

This paper uses a large dataset, covering more than 70% of the Dutch housing market, to analyze the relationship between market thinness, price setting behavior and time to sell. Our findings confirm the typical result that overpricing increases the time on market. In addition, we find evidence...

This paper provides a discussion of the `housing market' channels of the monetarytransmission mechanism (MTM) and offers some evidence on institutional differences in the European housing and mortgage markets. Using a number of VAR models, estimated individually for nine European countries over...

Using a multi-tier model of the housing market, we show that both starters and movers benefit from mortgage interest deduction for higher income groups. However, such tax favouring also tends to facilitate house price explosions, especially when interest rates and downpayment ratios are low....

Politicians and car owners are regularly concerned about the level of gasoline prices. Especially, Dutch gasoline prices seem to be high in an European perspective. This paper therefore analyses the developments of gasoline prices in the Netherlands and some other European countries from 1996 up...

This paper analyzes the welfare implications of creating a Single Euro Payments Area. We study the effects of increased network compatibility and payment scale economies on consumer and merchant card fees and its impact on card usage. In particular, we model competition among debit cards and...

In this article, we survey the recent theoretical literature on payment cards and study their implications for public policy. Payment card networks have faced regulatory scrutiny in several countries regarding the setting of various fees including interchange fees fees paid by the merchant's...