The basic health insurance in the Netherlands includes a mandatory deductible of currently 385 euros per adult per year. Several municipalities offer a group contract for low-income people in which the deductible is reinsured, meaning that out-of-pocket spending under the deductible is covered by supplementary insurance. This study examines to what extent such reinsurance leads to higher pharmaceutical spending.

CPB Discussion Paper 387 | 30 November 2018

28 pages | pdf document, 1.7 MB

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We discuss existing measures of banking competition along with their advantages and disadvantages. For the Panzar and Rosse H-statistic,we further investigate the robustness of its estimates.

CPB Discussion Paper 386 | 14 November 2018

28 pages | pdf document, 916.2 KB

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We estimate the impact of the free movement of people (FMP) principle on bilateral intra-EU migration stocks using a gravity model. Employing a combination of the World Bank and the UN’s global migration databases, with observations between 1960 and 2015, allows us to analyse the impact of the FMP for most EU member states.

CPB Discussion Paper 385 | 19 October 2018

42 pages | pdf document, 1.1 MB

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We assess the relative importance of demand and supply factors as determinants of regional variation in healthcare expenditures in the Netherlands. Our empirical approach follows individuals who migrate between regions. We use individual data on annual healthcare expenditures for the entire Dutch population between the years 2006 and 2013.

CPB Discussion Paper 384 | 18 October 2018

40 pages | pdf document, 1.1 MB

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The purpose of this document is to put the developments of globalisation into perspective for the Dutch labour market.

CPB Background Document | 16 October 2018

28 pages | pdf document, 1.1 MB

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We re-examine the structure of the financial sector, with a focus on firm financing, household assets and the structure of the banking sector of the 28 EU member countries, Japan and the United States.

CPB Discussion Paper 383 | 25 September 2018

48 pages | pdf document, 2.9 MB

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The Dutch economy continues to flourish, with growth figures of 2.8% this year and 2.6% in 2019. Unemployment will drop to 3.5%, and most households will experience an increase in purchasing power. In this publication CPB presents its analyses and projections of both the Dutch and worldwide economy in 2018 and 2019.

MEV 2019 | 18 September 2018

16 pages | pdf document, 1.7 MB

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We show that this reform not only affected consumption of this care type, but also the consumption of three other types of long-term care that are financed through another public scheme.

CPB Discussion Paper 382 | 13 September 2018

24 pages | pdf document, 975.9 KB

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This article examines whether the productivity spillovers from a large share of highly educated workers occur within regions, sectors and/or firms. To distinguish between these possibilities, I follow a two-stage procedure to estimate a Mincerian wage equation using matched employer-employee panel data on individual earnings and educational attainment.

CPB Discussion Paper 381 | 3 September 2018

34 pages | pdf document, 1.1 MB

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"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, 1.7 MB

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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