This paper analyses investment strategies of three types of Dutch 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...

This article investigates investment strategies of Dutch pension funds, life insurers and nonlife insurers, using quarterly flow-of-funds data. The results suggest that all three investor types buy past losers and sell past winners, although they only partially rebalance their portfolios that way.

The crisis has revived interest in the determinants of bank earnings. We investigate the relationship between profitability and balance sheet composition of 28 national banking sectors. Using Statistical Cost Accounting, we find a plausible pattern of individual assets’ and liabilities’...

Using area-wide data, we 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 monetary contraction,...

This study addresses the sustainability of the Dutch system of supplementary pensions, that is, supplementary to the state old-age pension. Traditionally, the system is characterised by high-quality defined-benefit schemes that offer members a high degree of pension security. However, the...

When the financial crisis erupted in 2007, it quickly became clear that many vulnerabilities had built up in the system, unnoticed by the financial authorities. Assets that had been considered safe proved to be risky and illiquid, the level and spread of risks were unclear and many market...

This paper investigates the role of bank lending in the monetary transmission process in the Netherlands. We observe significant differences between the responses of corporate and household lending following a monetary shock. We also find that banks hold a buffer stock of securities which they...

This paper investigates asymmetric effects of monetary policy over the business cycle. A two-state Markov Switching Model is employed to model both recessions and expansions. For the United States and Germany, strong evidence is found that monetary policy is more effective in a recession than...

This paper analyses the role of bank lending in the monetary transmission process in Germany. We follow a sectoral approach by distinguishing corporate lending and household lending. We find that banks respond to a monetary contraction by adjusting their securities holdings, rather than reducing...