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Transaction costs have attracted considerable attention in the theoretical literature on residential mobility. Transaction costs are thought to cause suboptimal consumption of housing but may also negatively affect labor market outcomes. In the current paper, we demonstrate empirically for the Netherlands that transaction costs have a strong negative effect on the owners' probability of moving. Under a range of different specifications, it appears that a 1 percent-point increase in the value of transaction costsuas a percentage of the value of the residenceudecreases residential mobility rates by (at least) 8 percent. The estimates imply that ownership to ownership mobility rates would be substantially higher in the absence of the current 6 percent buyer transaction tax. Our estimates are consistent with the observation that in the Netherlands transaction costs mainly consist of buyer transaction costs.

Many empirical studies suggest that financial reform promoted bank competition in most mature and emerging economies. However, some earlier studies that adopted conventional approaches to measure competition have concluded that bank competition in China declined during the past decade, despite progressive reforms implemented since the 1980s. We show that this apparent contradiction is the result of flawed measurement. Conventional indicators such as the Lerner index and Panzar–RosseH-statistic fail to measure competition in Chinese loan markets properly due to the system of interest rate regulation. By contrast, the profit elasticity (PE) approach does not suffer from these shortcomings. Using balance sheet information for a large sample of banks operating in China during 1996–2008, we show that competition actually increased in the past decade when the PE indicator is used. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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This article analyses the impact of loan market competition on the interest rates applied by euro area banks to loans during the period 1994–2004, using a novel measure of competition called the Boone indicator. We find evidence that stronger competition implies significantly lower spreads between bank and market interest rates for most loan market products, in line with expectations. This result implies that stronger competition causes both lower bank interest rates and a stronger pass-through of market rate changes into bank rates. Evidence of the latter is also presented by our Error Correction Model (ECM) for bank rates. Further, banks compensate income losses from increased loan market competition by offering lower deposit rates. Our findings with respect to the loan market rates have important monetary policy implications, as they suggest that measures to promote competition in the European banking sector are likely to render the monetary policy transmission mechanism more effective. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article is the first that applies a new measure of competition, the Boone indicator, to the banking industry. This approach is able to measure competition of bank market segments, such as the loan market, whereas many well-known measures of competition can consider the entire banking market only. Like most other model-based measures, this approach ignores differences in bank product quality and design, as well as the attractiveness of innovations. We measure competition on the lending markets in the five major EU countries as well as, for comparison, the UK, the US and Japan. Our findings indicate that over the period 1994-2004 the US had the most competitive loan market, whereas overall loan markets in Germany and Spain were among the best competitive in the EU. The Netherlands occupied a more intermediate position, whereas in Italy competition declined significantly over time. The French, Japanese and UK loan markets were generally less competitive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates to what extent the mark-up on the lending rate for mortgages depends on expected prepayment. It identifies the effect of the risk of expected prepayment by using a unique dataset of Dutch borrowers insured against default. It is argued that expected prepayment is mainly caused by expected residential mobility of the borrower, which might be due to a change of the value of the collateral or because of a change of income of the borrower. The estimates indicate that lenders require a higher mark-up on the lending rate from households with a lower liquidity constraint, while the collateral constraint has a very limited influence on the mark-up. Thus, it appears that lenders take into account of the possibility that future income shocks may improve the relative position of households in the housing market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an empirical study of pricing in the Dutch mortgage market. For a narrowly defined set of endowment mortgages (with a fixed lending rate of 10 years), we find that the price dispersion within lenders is larger than the dispersion across lenders. Prices remain dispersed across lenders, even after controlling for characteristics of the borrower, the municipality and the government bond rate. Apparently, the mortgage market is not fully transparent, which impedes competition in the mortgage market. We also find that the price dispersion for mortgages sold by banks is smaller than that for mortgages sold by other lenders. A likely explanation is that lenders using middlemen have higher agency costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies whether population migration data can be used to answer questions on labour mobility between regions. Using regional data of the Statistisches Bundesamt for population and labour migration, panel data estimations are conducted for the period 1993–1995, as the high average migratory flows of the earlier period, 1989–1992, had settled down. The conclusion emerges that if normalized population and labour migration data are used, the discrepancy in the results is small and this study's results on elasticity coefficients for identical models in each of the cases by and large produce similar results. The major difference emerges with the elasticity coefficient of the housing variable. In general, one may conclude that population migration may be used to examine labour migration issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we analyse the dynamics of the welfare state, focusing on the Netherlands and Sweden. The basic question is whether the different social systems of these countries result in differences in persistency of benefit dependency. We conclude that although benefit dependency at a macroeconomic level is more or less the same, patterns of mobility of individuals between benefits and jobs are different. These different patterns are partly explained by overrepresentation of benefits with a high degree of persistency in the Netherlands. This overrepresentation is, however, not sufficient to account for the large differences observed in dynamics. Characteristics of the welfare state account for that. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]