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 provides optimal labor and dividend income taxation in a general equilibrium model with oligopolistic competition and endogenous firms' entry. In the long run the optimal dividend income tax corrects for inefficient entry. The dividend income tax depends on the form of competition and...

This paper reviews studies exploring how higher bank capital requirements affect economic growth. There is little evidence of a direct effect; research focuses on the indirect effects of capital requirements on credit supply, bank asset risk, and cost of bank capital, which in turn can affect...

The crisis of 2007-2009 has shown that financial market turbulence can lead to huge funding liquidity problems for banks. This paper provides empirical evidence on banks' responses to wholesale funding shocks, using data of seventeen of the largest Dutch banks over the period January 2004 to...

This paper investigates the benefits of banks' direct investment in foreign subsidiaries and branches for non-financial multinationals. The paper builds on the literature on international banks which has primarily focused on the implications for host countries, rather than for its international...

Traditional theory suggests that high franchise value limits bank risk-taking incentives. Then why did many banks with exceptionally valuable franchises get exposed to new financial instruments, resulting in significant losses during the crisis? This paper attempts to reconcile theory and...

We investigate the effects of the announcement and the disclosure of the clarification, methodology, and outcomes of the US banking stress tests on banks' equity prices, credit risk, systematic risk, and systemic risk during the 2009-13 period. We find only weak evidence that stress tests after...

In this article we empirically analyze how the Tourist Test methodology affects the level of multilateral interchange fees (MIFs) for debit card payments over time. Using Dutch cost data for 2002 and 2009 we argue that this method leads to rising cost for merchants in the long run. The outcomes...

When does the general public lose trust in banks? We provide empirical evidence using responses by Dutch survey participants to eight hypothetical scenarios. We find that members of the general public care strongly about executive compensation. Negative media reports, falling stock prices, and...

This paper provides a new estimation method for the marginal expected shortfall (MES) based on multivariate extreme value theory. In contrast to previous studies, the method does not assume specific dependence structure among bank equity returns and is applicable to both large and small systems....