The lack of available prices in the Dutch life insurance industry makes competition an elusive concept that defies direct observation. Therefore, this paper investigates competition by analysing several factors which may affect the competitive nature of a market and various indirect measurement...

We analyze the impact of homeownership on unemployment duration using a theoretical model of job search. Earlier studies suggest that this relationship should be positive because workers are less mobile when they own a home. Nevertheless, most of the empirical studies in Europe find an opposite...

We analyse empirically price-setting in the Dutch mortgage market, using information on about 124,000 Dutch households and 54 mortgage lenders over the years 1996-2001. For a narrowly defined set of mortgages (which have a fixed lending rate for ten years), the range of the lending rate...

Transaction costs have attracted considerable attention in the theoretical literature on residential mobility. In many European countries, these costs mainly consist of ad-valorem transaction costs. In the current paper, we demonstrate empirically for the Netherlands that the transaction costs...

This paper analyses the impact of loan market competition on the interest rates applied by euro area banks to loans and deposits during the 1994-2004 period, using a novel measure of competition called the Boone indicator. We find evidence that stronger competition implies significantly lower...

In this paper, we study the effects of housing market institutions on labour mobility. We construct durations for individuals leaving their current job for a different job, becoming unemployed or leaving the labour market, from a sample of households from 14 European countries in...

This paper is the first that applies a recently introduced measure of competition, the Boone indicator, to the banking industry. This approach is able to measure competition of bank market segments, such as the loan market, whereas many well-known measures of competition can consider the entire...

The Profit Elasticity (PE) is a new competition measure introduced in Boone (2008). So far, there was no direct proof that this measure can identify regimes of competition empirically. We focus on this issue using data of Genesove and Mullin (1998), in which different regimes of competition...