This paper examines the impact of participants’ age distribution on the asset allocation of Dutch pension funds, using a unique data set of pension fund investment plans for 2007. Theory predicts a negative effect of age on (strategic) equity exposures. We observe that pension funds do...

This paper assesses the sophistication of pension funds’ investment policies using data on 748 Dutch pension funds during the 1999–2006 period. We develop three indicators of sophistication: gross rounding of investment choices, investments in alternative sophisticated asset...

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 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,...

In efficient markets, security prices move in response to the release of new information. Since transactions contain information, trading itself causes traders and market makers to update their beliefs and prices to be revised. The main part of this thesis (Chapters 2, 3, and 4) is devoted to...

Using high frequency data on ten infrequently traded stocks during the year 1999, we measure the information content of a trade and its relation to the trading intensity.While the price impact curve for frequently traded stocks monotonically increases towards the full information price, we find...