Publications


November 30, 2018

The effect of reinsuring a deductible on pharmaceutical spending: A Dutch case study on low-income people

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.

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November 14, 2018

Can we measure banking sector competition robustly?

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.

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October 19, 2018

Estimating migration changes from the EU’s free movement of people principle

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.

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October 18, 2018

Causes of regional variation in Dutch healthcare expenditures: evidence from movers

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.

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September 25, 2018

The changing landscape of firm financing in Europe, the United States and Japan

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.

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September 13, 2018

Are substitute services a barrier to controlling long-term care expenditures?

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.

September 3, 2018

The scope of the external return to higher education

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.

May 22, 2018

How large are road traffic externalities in the city? The highway tunneling in Maastricht, the Netherlands

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.

May 7, 2018

Economic Decision Problems in Multi-Level Flood Prevention: a new graph-based approach used for real world applications

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.

March 29, 2018

Does managed competition constrain hospitals’ contract prices? Evidence from the Netherlands

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.