Since the European Central Bank’s (ECB’s) 2003 strategy review, the importance of macro-financial amplification channels for monetary policy has increasingly gained recognition. This paper takes stock of this evolution and discusses the desirability of further incremental enhancements in the...

The formulation of a common European monetary policy offers an important challenge to policymakers both in Europe and around the globe. The analysis of monetary transmission mechanisms in Europe, and the US, provides insights of great importance as the institutional environment of monetary...

For a panel of 20 industrialized countries from 1970 through 2002, we analyze the role of financial variables in economic cycles. We focus on equity busts, which are considered a proxy for downward revisions of economic prospects. Particularly in the second half of our sample, we find that...

This paper analyses investment strategies of three types of institutional investors pension funds, life insurers and non-life insurers over the period 1999-2005. We use balance sheet and cash flow data, including purchases and sales of equity, fixed income and real estate. We trace asset...

We investigate whether insurers base their solvency margins on risk factors even when operating under a supervisory regime where minimum solvency requirements do not fully take such risk factors into account. To do this, we use a dataset of about 350 Dutch insurers from all major lines of...

This article examines the financial behaviour of Dutch pension funds during 2002-2005, a turbulent period characterized by stock market corrections and historically low interest rates. Especially for industry-wide funds, financial transactions remained consistent with rebalancing a strategically...

This paper examines the financial behaviour of 77 Dutch pension funds during 2002-2005. Using microdata, we investigate differences across various types of funds. Both the asset mix and the degree of home bias are related to the size of pension funds: large institutions invest more in equity and...

We investigate the capital structure of 350 Dutch insurers during the period 1995-2005. Our main findings are: (1) a small company size, a mutual organisation, high profitability, large equity investments, and being a fire insurer, all contribute to higher solvency margins; (2) minimum solvency...

Using area-wide data, we perform a VAR analysis to simulate the responses of inflation and real output following monetary shocks in the EMU. We find that short-term interest rate shocks have a significant impact on real activity, but hardly on prices. M3 shows a perverse short-term response to a...