This paper discusses policy instruments for redirecting technical change within the electricity sector to mitigate climate change. First, we unravel the mechanism behind directed technical change, explaining why markets may underprovide innovations in expensive renewable technologies in...

The paper focuses on the relationship between competition and quality in the Dutch hospital sector. We analyse the period of 2004-2008, in which a healthcare reform took place in the Netherlands, introducing competition in the healthcare sector. The increased attention to hospital quality and...

In CPB Discussion Paper 209 we study incentives of financial intermediaries to reserve liquidity given that they can rely on the interbank market for their liquidity needs. Intermediaries can partially pledge their assets to each other, but not to the rest of the economy. Therefore liquidity...

We study how the possibility of renegotiation affects optimal bail-out policies for countries under asymmetric information on a country's cost of reforms. To that end, we solve the Bellman equation describing the optimal bail-out mechanism in a multiple-period principal-agent model with adverse...

This study assesses the role of feed-in tariffs (FITs) and renewable energy certificates (RECs) in creating incentives for cross-border investments and for investments in particular technological portfolios via M&A. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 11pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-fareast-language: ZH-CN; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA;"><span style="color: #000000;">The analysis explores the dataset on M&As in alternative energy sources...</span></span>

This paper studies the knowledge spillovers generated by renewable-energy technologies, unraveling the technological fields that benefit from knowledge developed in storage, solar, wind, marine, hydropower, geothermal, waste and biomass energy technologies. A <a href="http://www.cpb.nl/en/publication/on-which-technologies-do-renewable-energy-innovations-build-on">CPB Background Document...

This report develops a roadmap for reliability policy in network industries. Based on economic theory, we analyse the relationship between reliability and various types of government policy: privatisation, liberalisation, regulation, unbundling, and 'commitment policy'. We let government...

Targeted advertising can benefit consumers through lower prices for access to websites. Yet, if consumers dislike that websites collect their personal information, their welfare may go down. We study competition for consumers between websites that can show targeted advertisements. We find that...

We study optimal timing of regulated investment in a real options setting, in which the regulated monopolist has private information on investment costs. In solving the ensuing agency problem, the regulator trades off investment timing inefficiency against the dead-weight loss arising from high...

Large banks derive a funding advantage from being too-big-to-fail, while small banks do not. To estimate the funding advantage we explain the CDS spreads of small banks in six major European countries during the crisis by market fundamentals and bank-specific characteristics. Next, we...