Little is known about how competition affects child care centers’ quality. This paper examines the impact of competition on the quality of Dutch child care centers. The results show that high density of child care centers in an area improves scores in quality assessment measures. The...

A well-performing life insurance industry benefits consumers, producers and insurance firm stockholders alike. Unfavourable market conditions stress the need for life insurers to perform well in order to remain solvent. Using a unique supervisory data set, this paper investigates competition and...

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...

This paper investigates competition in the Dutch non-life insurance industry indirectly by measuring scale economies and X-inefficiency, assuming that strong competition would force insurance firms to exploit unused scale economies and to push down inefficiencies. We observe substantial...

Boone (2008) introduces a new theory based measure of competition, the so-called Boone-indicator. The indicator is based on the relationship between performance, in terms of profits, and efficiency, measured as marginal costs. Whether the indicator is able to correctly measure competition in...

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

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...

The adequate performance of banks, insurers and pension funds is of crucial importance to their private and business customers. The prices and quality of financial products sold by such entities are largely determined by operational efficiency and the degree of competition in the markets...

In this paper we seek to contribute to the literature on competition and innovation by focusing on individual firms within the U.S. banking industry in the period 1984-2004. We measure innovation by estimating technology gaps and find evidence of an inverted-U relationship between competition...

The Panzar-Rosse test has been widely applied to assess competitive conduct, often in specifcations controlling for firm scale or using a price equation. We show that neither a price equation nor a scaled revenue function yields a valid measure for competitive conduct. Moreover, even an unscaled...