"Effect trade conflict limited, escalation only has losers". This background document provides information on the economic consequences of the current trade dispute between the US and several countries that announced retaliatory packages or filed them already with the WTO.
CPB Background Document | 6 July 2018
42 pages | pdf document, 2.4 MB
This study shows that constructing a large dataset, which sufficiently covers all firm sizes, is a prerequisite for studying the divergence hypothesis. We merge datasets of individual firm and employee data in the years 20062015 for the Netherlands, resulting in a representative sample of corporations. We find no evidence of diverging productivity between firms on the national frontier and laggard firms.
CPB Background Document | 2 July 2018
60 pages | pdf document, 5.2 MB
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.
CPB Background Document | 5 June 2018
26 pages | pdf document, 1.3 MB
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.
CPB Background Document | 5 June 2018
20 pages | pdf document, 868.6 KB
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.
CPB Communication | 29 May 2018
16 pages | pdf document, 1 MB
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.
CPB Background Document | 29 May 2018
20 pages | pdf document, 1.4 MB
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.
CPB Discussion Paper 379 | 22 May 2018
34 pages | pdf document, 5.2 MB
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.
CPB Discussion Paper 380 | 7 May 2018
42 pages | pdf document, 2.1 MB
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.
CPB Discussion Paper 378 | 29 March 2018
24 pages | pdf document, 2.9 MB
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. Positive domestic dynamics between increasing employment, higher disposable income levels, higher consumption and more investments will lead to a 3.2% economic growth in 2018 and 2.7% in 2019. Over the 2017–2019 period, the Dutch economy is projected to outperform that of the eurozone by 0.6 percentage points, in each of those years.
CEP 2018 | 22 March 2018
20 pages | pdf document, 3.2 MB
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.
CPB Communication | 22 March 2018
6 pages | pdf document, 1 MB
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.
CPB Background Document | 22 March 2018
26 pages | pdf document, 1.3 MB
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. Positive domestic dynamics between increasing employment, higher disposable income levels, higher consumption and more investments will lead to a 3.2% economic growth in 2018 and 2.7% in 2019. Over the 2017–2019 period, the Dutch economy is projected to outperform that of the eurozone by 0.6 percentage points, in each of those years.
CPB Policy Brief 2018/06 | 6 March 2018
20 pages | pdf document, 3.2 MB
The existence of an urban wage growth premium is a well-established empirical fact. This article challenges the conventional view that faster wage growth for urban workers is caused by human capital spillovers.
CPB Discussion Paper 377 | 28 February 2018
36 pages | pdf document, 1.5 MB
This article argues that the spatial scope of agglomeration economies is much more complex than is often assumed in the agglomeration literature. We provide insight into this issue by analyzing panel data on individual wages with a high level of spatial detail.
CPB Discussion Paper 376 | 28 February 2018
36 pages | pdf document, 4.2 MB
The CPB World Trade Monitor (WTM) is an instrument for bringing together, aggregating, and summarizing worldwide monthly data on international trade and industrial production.
CPB Background Document | 23 February 2018
40 pages | pdf document, 1.5 MB
The Netherlands witnessed major reforms in the taxation of (potential) secondary earners over the past decade. Using the inverse-optimal method of optimal taxation we recover the implicit social welfare weights of single- and dual-earner couples over time. The social welfare weights are grosso modo well-behaved before the reforms.
CPB Discussion Paper 375 | 15 February 2018
60 pages | pdf document, 3.6 MB
This paper evaluates the quantitative effects of two teacher traineeships that were implemented in the Netherlands to address shortages of fully qualified teachers in secondary education. Applying a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, we estimate the effects of being selected to participate in one of the traineeships. We find no significant local average treatment effects of being selected on the probabilities of enrolling into academic teacher training, obtaining a full teaching qualification, and on working in education, although the point estimates are positive for the first two outcome variables.
CPB Discussion Paper 374 | 14 February 2018
34 pages | pdf document, 1.6 MB
Exploiting a rich data set on the Dutch market for assistance in daily housekeeping activities (ADHA), we find that larger providers obtain a higher price than do small providers. However, compared to other studies on market power in care markets this price difference is considered small to moderate.
CPB Discussion Paper 373 | 8 February 2018
24 pages | pdf document, 480.6 KB
How effective are unconventional monetary policies? Through which mechanisms do they work? This discussion paper contains a detailed presentation of the new scientific evidence we reported in the policy brief, and adds to the relatively scarce literature in this field.
CPB Discussion Paper 371 | 6 February 2018
36 pages | pdf document, 583 KB
In this paper we investigate whether the targeted longer-term refinancing operations (TLTRO) and the asset purchase program (APP) led to lower interest rates on new corporate credit, and whether the signalling channel and the capital relief channel played any role in the transmission of these ECB policies.
CPB Discussion Paper 372 | 6 February 2018
22 pages | pdf document, 383.8 KB
According to economic theory, taxation drives a wedge between private and public benefits, which distorts labour supply, consumption and investment and leads to loss of welfare.
CPB Discussion Paper 370 | 24 January 2018
26 pages | pdf document, 1.6 MB
According to the Melitz (2003) model, potential exporters have to be sufficiently productive to overcome the entry costs of foreign markets. Once firms pass this productivity threshold, they all export. However, empirical evidence indicates that a substantial share of high-productive firms do not export.
CPB Discussion Paper 369 | 18 January 2018
50 pages | pdf document, 2.4 MB
Since 2006, the Dutch population has faced two different cost-sharing schemes in health insurance for curative care: a mandatory rebate of 255 euros in 2006 and 2007, and since 2008 a mandatory deductible. Using administrative data for the entire Dutch population, we compare the effect of both cost-sharing schemes on healthcare consumption between 2006 and 2013.
CPB Discussion Paper 367 | 7 December 2017
60 pages | pdf document, 1.5 MB
Presentation used by Wim Suyker at the 'Masterclass public finance Erasmus University – Algemene Rekenkamer', November 28, 2017.
CPB Presentation | 4 December 2017
