This paper estimates the wealth effect on consumption of both equity and housing wealth, Using data across 16 industrial countries differentiated by type of financial system and examining trends in these wealth effects over time. The three main conclusions are found and their policy implications...

Mullainathan and Shleifer (2002) argue that there are two types of media bias. One bias, called ideology, reflects a news outlet's desire to affect reader opinions in a particular direction. The second bias, referred to as spin, reflects the outlet's attempt to simply create a memorable story....

This paper reviews the rationale for co-ordination of macroeconomic policies in the euro area. It makes clear what co-ordination can do and what it cannot do in European practice. It concludes that with the Pact for Stability and Growth, the framework for co-ordination of fiscal policies has by...

Globalisation is a highly controversial topic. Despite its potential for accelerating growth and reducing poverty (to which most policy makers and economist would agree) objections are often expressed about the position of developing countries, and a number of damaging side-effects of the...

In this paper, we question whether there is a catch-up effect or announcement effect in 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...

The purpose of this Research Memorandum is to assess whether concepts from psychological theory may be useful in explaining herding and crises in financial markets. The conclusion is that the theory of cognitive dissonance, which assumes that the human brain seeks and processes information in a...

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...

This paper maps the empirical features of the Loan-to-Deposit (LTD) ratio with an eye on using it in macroprudential policy to mitigate liquidity risk. We inspect the LTD trends and cycles of 11 euro area countries by filtering methods and analyze the interaction between loans and deposits. We...

Do tightenings of bank lending standards permanently reduce bank lending? We construct a measure of a bank's level of lending standards using micro-data from the sample of banks participating in the Eurosystem Bank Lending Survey in The Netherlands and show that this level measure affects...

Five years after Lehman Brothers defaulted, the Dutch consumer confidence is still very low. Based on a monthly time series analysis from 1978 onwards, we provide evidence that general economic indicators are not sufficient to explain consumer sentiment. We show that during the Great Recession...