This article applies quantile regression to assess the factors that influence the risk of incurring high trading costs. Using data on the equity trades of the world's second largest pension fund in the first quarter of 2002, we show that trade timing, momentum, volatility and the type of broker...

This paper investigates the cost efficiency and competitive behaviour of the non-life - or property and casualty - insurance market in the Netherlands over the period 1995-2012. We focus on the 2006 health care reform, where public health care insurance has been included in the non-life...

This paper investigates scale economies and the optimal scale of pension funds, estimating different cost functions with varying assumptions about the shape of the underlying average cost function: Ushaped versus monotonically declining. Using unique data for Dutch pension funds over 1992-2009,...

The traditional gravity model has been applied many times to international trade flows, especially in order to analyze trade creation and trade diversion. However, there are two fundamental objections to the model: it cannot describe substitutions between flows and it lacks a cogent theoretical...

A well-performing life insurance industry benefits consumers, producers and insurance firm stockholders alike. Unfavourable market conditions stress the need for life insurers to perform well in order to remain solvent. Using a unique supervisory data set, this paper investigates competition and...

This paper is the first to analyze the price effects of equity trading by a pension fund. We find that, on average, these effects are nonðnegligible: 20 basis points for buys and 26 basis points for sells. Furðthermore, we show that (relative) trade size and market capitalization, commonly...

Inflation hedging is an important issue for long-term investors, even during prolonged periods of relatively low inflation. This study analyzes the inflation-hedging properties of US stocks, bonds, and T-bills at the subindex level during the years 1983–2012. Our analysis provides only partial...

type="main" xml:lang="en" <title type="main">Abstract</title> <p>This article proposes a new method for estimating claim liabilities. Our approach is based on the observation from contract theory that there is information asymmetry between the insurer and the policyholder about the risks incurred by the latter. We show that...</p>