Trust offices (administratiekantoren) that repackage securities have been a central institution in Dutch finance since the late eighteenth century. Their basic form and functioning have remained largely the same, but over time, the repackaging has come to serve a variety of very different...

Why do some banks fail in financial crises while others survive? This paper answers this question by analysing the consequences of the Dutch financial crisis of the 1920s for 143 banks, of which 37 failed. Banks' choices in balance sheet composition, corporate governance practices and...

Why do some banks fail in financial crises while others survive? This article answers this question by analysing the effect of the Dutch financial crisis of the 1920s on 142 banks, of which 33 failed. We find that choices of balance sheet composition and product market strategy made in the...

We study the role of regional banking system characteristics for regional banking system fragility in Asia, Europe, Latin America and the US. We find that regional banking system fragility reduces when banks in the region jointly hold more liquid assets, are better capitalized, and when regional...

We study the sensitivity of banks’ credit supply to small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) in the UK to banks’ financial condition before and during the financial crisis. Employing unique data on the geographical location of all bank branches in the UK, we connect firms’ access to bank...

There is much debate on how the flow of information between firms should be organized, and whether existing privacy laws should be amended. We offer a welfare comparison of the three main current policies towards consumer privacy anonymity, opt in, and opt out within a two-period model of...

We propose a heteroscedastic regression model to identify the determinants of the dispersion in interest rates on loans granted to small and medium sized enterprises. We interpret unexplained deviations as evidence of the banks' discretionary use of market power in the loan rate setting process....

Competition authorities and regulatory agencies sometimes impose pricing restrictions on firms with substantial market power the dominant firms. We analyze the welfare effects of a ban on behaviour-based price discrimination in a two-period setting where the market displays a competitive and a...

Competing firms often have the possibility to jointly determine the magnitude of consumers' switching costs. Examples include compatibility decisions and the option of introducing number portability in telecom and banking. We put forward a model where firms jointly decide to reduce switching...

In this paper, we employ a registry of legal insider trading for Dutch listed firms to investigate the information content of trades by corporate insiders. Using a standard event-study methodology, we examine short-term stock price behavior around trades. We find that purchases are followed by...