We study the effect of house price shocks on the savings behaviour of Dutch homeowners over the period 2006-2011. Using unique administrative data, we build a balanced panel of slightly less than 2 million Dutch home owning households, containing information on house values, wealth, income and...

The value of implicit guarantees has declined from its peak at the height of the financial crisis, which is consistent with progress made regarding the bank regulatory reform agenda, as one would expect that many of the reform measures imply a more limited value of implicit guarantees for bank...

We study the price effects of forced sales on the Dutch housing market. A forced sale may result in a lower transaction price because of e.g. suboptimal incentives for revenue maximization. The lower transaction price may also spill over to regular (unforced) nearby transactions. We aim to...

We use a panel data set of about 1.7 million hospital records in 4,000 Dutch zip code regions for the years 2006-2009. We estimate the effect of physician fees and physician density on regional variation in hospital care for nine different treatments. Our results show that a 1 percent increase...

Over the course of the past few years, too much credit has been made available worldwide, due to financial innovation, overly optimistic expectations and loophole-ridden regulation. Regulatory supervisors have failed because they were unable to prevent this situation. Things took a bad turn...

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...

We review the literature on finance and growth with a focus on developed countries We find little evidence that increases in the traditional proxies for financial development will enhance growth in these countries. Potential causes include: decreasing returns, misallocation of credit,...

Reduced credit supply in the years 2008 and 2009 should have resulted in lower growth in industries that are more dependent on external finance. This effect should have been stronger in countries with a more prominent and/or more leveraged financial system. We focus on the OECD countries 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...

Growing pension savings lead to deeper capital markets. This can have a positive effect on economic growth by allowing firms that are more dependent on external finance to grow faster. We study this effect using data on 69 industrial sectors in 34 OECD countries for the period 2001-2010...