Publications

We investigate the major financing components which are used to purchase a house in the Netherlands. This is important to shed more light on the effects of changing lending norms. We look at the full universe of housing transactions in the Netherlands by making use of administrative data from Statistics Netherlands (CBS) for the period 2006-2014. →

Safe assets, assets with low risk and high liquidity, are the cornerstone for modern financial systems. The biggest holders of safe assets are banks, which need to hold safe assets to meet capital and liquidity requirements. Safe assets also provide high-quality, liquid collateral for banks’ repo transactions. Besides, safe assets provide benchmarks for the price formation of other financial assets. →

This publication discusses the need for an EMU banking union and describes three possible transition scenarios. This is a translation of chapter 4 of the Dutch publication. →

This CPB Background Document provides details of the simulations of shocks to the capital position of banks in the EMU that underpins the Financial Risk Report 2018 of the CPB. This involves investigating the potential impact of two legacy problems on the capital position of banks. These problems are the high amount of government debt, especially in Italy, and the high level of non-performing loans on banks’ balance sheets. →

Infrastructure projects are increasingly aiming to improve liveability, in particular in urban areas. We analyse a specific case in which an existing highway in an urban area was moved underground in order to improve intercity traffic flows and to reduce traffic externalities. →

Flood prevention policy is of crucial importance to the Netherlands. We assess economical optimal flood prevention where multiple barrier dams and dikes protect the hinterland against sea level rise and peak river discharges. Current optimal flood prevention methods only consider dike rings with no dependencies between dikes. We propose a graph-based model for a cost-benefit analysis to determine optimal dike heights with multiple dependencies between dikes and barrier dams. →

In the Dutch health care system health insurers negotiate with hospitals about the pricing of hospital products in a managed competition framework. In this paper, we study these contract prices that became for the first time publicly available in 2016. The data show substantive price variation between hospitals for the same products, and within a hospital for the same product across insurers. →

The Dutch economy is gathering steam. The economic boom is the result of a favourable international economy, low interest rates, expansive budgetary policy and a persistently strong housing market. These last two factors distinguish the Netherlands from other countries. →

Productivity growth is on the decline, in the OECD countries. In the Netherlands, structural growth is also slowing down. On the basis of this fact, the European Commission proposed that each EU Member State would install a national productivity board (NPB). The Council of the European Union has since adopted this proposal. →

The long-term interest rate in the Euro area is an important exogenous input in CPB macro-econometric models to project the world economy and the Dutch economy, so it is important to have a reliable projection for it. However, there were concerns about the CPB practice of forecasting the long-term interest rate, especially over the inconsistency of long-term interest rate projections in the short and medium term. Therefore, this document compares the old CPB practice with several alternative forecasting methods for long-term interest rates, and evaluates these methods. →