Private trade credit insurance - covering the risk of non-payment - plays an important role in facilitating domestic and international trade, especially within Europe. Due to lack of data, however, very little is known about the influence of shocks on the market for private trade credit...

Using an event study approach, we examine financial markets' reactions to the publication of the ECB's Comprehensive Assessment of banks in the euro area. Our results suggest that banks' stock market prices and CDS spreads generally did not react to the publication of the results of the...

Survey data show that many respondents save for retirement in unconventional retirement accounts, such as investments in real estate. In countries where retirement savings are not mandatory for self-employed, representatives of this group often report this as an argument against making...

We assess the competitiveness of the $400 billion dollar U.S. bank consumer loan market by comparing results from different competition measures-HHI, Lerner Index, H-Statistic along with three others, two of which are related to frontier analysis. These measures are typically weakly related to...

The purpose of this paper is to assess the history of global liquidity regulation until the revised Basel III proposals in 2013 and to analyze the interaction of capital regulation and banks' liquidity buffers. Our analysis suggests that regulating capital is associated with declining liquidity...

We provide empirical evidence on banks' responses to shocks in wholesale funding, using data of 181 euro area banks over the period August 2007 to June 2013. Banks' adjustments of loan volumes and lending rates in response to funding liquidity shocks are analysed in a panel VAR framework. The...

A limited understanding of mortgage contracts and the risks involved may have contributed to the origination of the financial crisis. We have designed a special questionnaire to relate mortgage loan decisions to financial literacy and financial advice. Our findings show that homeowners seem well...

It is widely perceived that the supply of mortgages, especially since the extensive liberalization of the mortgage market of the 1980s, has had implications for the housing market in the Netherlands. In this paper we introduce a new method to estimate a credit condition index (CCI). The CCI...

In the policy debate on increasing the statutory retirement age, the issue has been raised to make an exception for workers with demanding occupations, since health considerations may make it unreasonable to expect them to work longer. We use unique Dutch survey data to analyze the general...

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...