We record the existence of an availability heuristic that is reflected in disaster myopia of U.S. investors and exists prior to the attacks of 9/11. We argue that this is fueled by an aggregate experience hypothesis effect, resulting in a pronounced increase in the sensitivity of U.S. stock...

This paper quantifies the effect of reallocation dynamics on aggregate productivity developments in the banking sectors of Europe and the United States. We document an increase in productivity over the period 1995-2009, on the order of 11 in the US and 19 in Europe. At an annual frequency,...

In this paper, we investigate which industries drive the trade-specialization nexus in the European Union over the 1997-2006 period. We follow Melitz (2003), and argue that industries need 'room to move' in order for increasing trade openness to translate into increased specialization. Our paper...

We examine the relationship between bank size and financial stability by viewing the supervisor of a banking system as an investor holding a portfolio of banks. Based on this view, we investigate the role of large banks in determining the systemic risk in this portfolio. Our results, based on...

In this paper we assess cost and profit efficiency for a sample of banks operating on the Dutch banking market in the period 1992-1998, using stochastic frontier efficiency analysis. Over the entire period, the cost-efficient frontier deteriorates but mean cost efficiency and profit efficiency...

In this paper, we question whether there is a catch-up effect or announcement effectin Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) from the European Union (EU) to the ten EU accession countries. We study FDI outflows from the Netherlands, a small open economy with few historical ties to Eastern Europe, and...

In this paper we enrich the Brabander (1981) and Brander and Krugman (1983) model of reciprocal entry by placing it i a setting of two-sided asymetric information. Following the limit pricing methodology of Milgrom and Roberts (1982), we show that the limit price is affected by a firm''s desire...

We study experimentally how players learn to make decisions if they face many different (normal-form) games. Games are generated randomly from a uniform distribution in each of 100 rounds. We find that agents do extrapolate between games but learn to play strategically equivalent games in the...

In this paper, we compare experience-earnings profiles of employees with vocational and generaleducation background in Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, three countries withfundamentally different education systems. Using Mixed-Effects Linear Regression Models we showthat earnings...

In this paper, we combine elementary revealed preference principles and nonparametric estimation techniques in order to obtain nonparametric bounds on the distribution of the money metric utility over a population of heterogeneous households. The main benefit of our approach is that it is...