This study is an introduction to and summary of the 2002 Annual Meeting papers of the Royal Netherlands Economic Association. The general theme of this year's Annual Meeting is 'The role of wealth in the economy'. It is covered by 5 papers, which address the following topics: (i) household...

Some studies in the literature exert strong criticism with regards to the Structural Policy of the European Union. This study reviews the past Structural Policy and pays special attention to the proposals for the next budgetary period 2007-2013 as laid down in the Dutch IBO-report (2001)....

This paper provides a survey of the economic literature on immigration. We first give an impression of immigration in the Netherlands in 1500-1960, followed by a discussion of the long term economic consequences of the mass migration preceding Word War I. We then discuss some literature which...

Using a novel way to identify relationship and transaction banks, we study how banks' lending techniques affect funding to SMEs over the business cycle. For 21 countries we link the lending techniques that banks use in the direct vicinity of firms to these firms' credit constraints at two...

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...

This paper investigates the benefits of banks' direct investment in foreign subsidiaries and branches for non-financial multinationals. The paper builds on the literature on international banks which has primarily focused on the implications for host countries, rather than for its international...

Financial constraints and risk taking are two well-established determinants of firm performance, however, no research analyzes how these variables are connected in the context of a high risk environment. Using data from microfinance clients in Tanzania, we derive a novel financial constraints...

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...