This paper is the first that applies a recently introduced measure of competition, the Boone indicator, to the banking industry. This approach is able to measure competition of bank market segments, such as the loan market, whereas many well-known measures of competition can consider the entire...

Increasing labour market flexibility is at the top of the European agenda. A new and challenging view is a lack of mobility in the labour market may arise from rigidities in the housing market. The research in this book has been inspired by the intriguing hypothesis put forward by Andrew...

We analyse empirically price-setting in the Dutch mortgage market, using information on about 124,000 Dutch households and 54 mortgage lenders over the years 1996-2001. For a narrowly defined set of mortgages (which have a fixed lending rate for ten years), the range of the lending rate...

Transaction costs have attracted considerable attention in the theoretical literature on residential mobility. In many European countries, these costs mainly consist of ad-valorem transaction costs. In the current paper, we demonstrate empirically for the Netherlands that the transaction costs...

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...

In this paper, we study the effects of housing market institutions on labour mobility. We construct durations for individuals leaving their current job for a different job, becoming unemployed or leaving the labour market, from a sample of households from 14 European countries in...

This paper examines the hypotheses presented by Oswald (1999) for the Netherlands. These are: I) Home-owners are less likely to move than renters, II) Unemployed home-owners are less likely to move than unemployed renters, III) Owners of houses are less likely to move to another job, because...

It is well-known that the probability of an unemployed person finding a job decreases over the unemployment spell. On the one hand, this results from duration dependence at the individual level: unemployed job seekers may become discouraged, loose their working skills and become stigmatised by...

This document presents four scenarios for the future of finance. The goal of our study is to imagine the future of finance and to identify challenges faced by policymakers in fighting systemic risk. It builds upon a tradition within the CPB to develop scenarios for policy analysis. We develop...

The Profit Elasticity (PE) is a new competition measure introduced in Boone (2008). So far, there was no direct proof that this measure can identify regimes of competition empirically. We focus on this issue using data of Genesove and Mullin (1998), in which different regimes of competition...