1,720,984 research outputs found
Sale Price Expectations and Mortgage Commitment: Inaccuracy versus Price Setting Behaviour
No full textThis paper investigates why the homeowner’s expectation about the sale price of a house deviates from its market price. This paper has two distinct contributions. First, we argue that sale price expectations are individual specific. Omitting this individual effect leads to biased hedonic estimates. As a result, hedonic estimates conditional on individual characteristics are preferred. Second, we economically interpret the individual effect in terms of inaccuracy of homeowners and a specific type of price setting behaviour (“fishing for a relatively high selling price”). In particular, we focus on the role of mortgage commitment, which is measured by the loan-to-income ratio. We argue that homeowners with a higher loan-to-income ratio are less likely to move. Consequently, they incur a low opportunity cost of fishing. They are also less inclined to search. As a result, homeowners with a higher loan-toincome ratio might have more incentive to fish for a higher sale price, but they may also be less accurate with regard to the market price. Our estimates confirm these two hypotheses
The Importance of Income and Housing Wealth Constraints for Future Residential Mobility
No full textWe investigate the size of the mark-up on the lending rate for endowment mortgages, due to expected prepayment by the borrower. For this type of mortgage, prepayment is mostly the result of mobility in the housing market. We control for the risk of default by using a unique data set of Dutch borrowers insured against default. The estimates indicate that households with a higher liquidity constraint are less likely to prepay, as they have a lower mark-up on the lending rate. In contrast, the collateral constraint has a very limited influence on the mark-up. We explain this result as follows. Usually, income constraints are generated at the household level, whereas constraints on housing wealth pertain to the regional level. Hence, income changes may improve the relative position of households in the housing market, but an increase in homeowners’ housing wealth does not improve their relative position in the housing market
Estimating the Impact of Experience Rating on the Inflow into Disability Insurance in the Netherlands
No full textThis paper examines the effects of experience rating on the inflow into disability insurance (DI) in the Netherlands, using unique longitudinal administrative data from the social benefitadministration. We follow a difference-in-differences approach to identify the impact of changes in DI premiums. Due to unawareness of the experience rating system, employers seem to have been triggered to increase preventative activities, once they have experienced increases in DI premium. We find this impact to be substantial, amounting to a 15% reduction of the DI inflow
Managerial perceptions of works councils’ effectiveness in the Netherlands
No full textAlthough works councils have, by and large, equally extensive legal rights in Germany and the Netherlands, this is the first econometric analysis that investigates the influence of works councils on firm performance for the Netherlands. We use a nation-wide Dutch dataset with information on management’s perceptions of the works council’s impact on their firms’ efficiency and innovation. Following Jirjahn and Smith (2006), we find that managerial perceptions crucially depend on the firm’s human resource management policies and market strategies. Additionally, we argue that managerial perceptions are related to the works council’s role attitude and management’s leadership style. For this argument, we find support, too
Explaining the wealth holdings of different cohorts: productivity growth and social security
No full textIt is well-known that individuals born in different periods of time (cohorts or generations) exhibit different wealth accumulation paths. While previous studies have used cohort dummies to proxy for this fact, research in this area suffers from a serious identification problem, i.e., how to disentangle age, time, and cohort effects from a simple cross-section or a time series of cross-sections. Furthermore, the use of cohort dummies leaves unexplained the reasons for the differences across cohorts.
In this paper, we go beyond the simple use of cohort dummies to capture the differences in wealth holdings across generations. We use basic economic theory to propose two indicators of the economic conditions under which households accumulate wealth. The first one represents productivity differences across cohorts: the aggregate level of gross national product per capita around the time the head of the household entered the labor market. The second measure summarizes the
changes in Social Security during the head of household s working life.
Using panel data from the Dutch Socio-Economic Panel, we show that productivity growth can explain all the cohort effects present in income data, while productivity growth and the generosity of Social Security can explain all the cohort effects present in household net worth. Thus, cohort effects can be traced back to past economic conditions and we do not need to resort to differences in preferences or other reasons to explain the
differences in wealth holdings across generations
Saving and Cohabition: The Economic Consequences of Living with ones Parents in Italy and the Netherlands
No full textAbstract The paper deals with the effects of cohabitation of grown children with their parents on household saving, using data from Italy and the Netherlands. It presents a two-period game-theoretical model where the child has to decide whether to move out of the parental home. This decision is affected by transaction costs, the child's preference for independence, and by the consumption loss induced by the move (consumption is a public good while the child lives in the parental home). We show that the child's income share affects the household saving decision, in contrast with predictions of the standard unitary model of household decision making. Empirical results from both countries are supportive of the key model predictions. We find strong positive effects of the child income share on the saving rate in Italy, where we calculate saving as the difference between disposable income and consumption but cannot distinguish children who will leave from those who will stay. We also find some significant effects of the child income share on household saving rate in the Netherlands, where saving is computed as the change over time in financial wealth. In the Dutch data we distinguish between children who stay and children who leave. The effect of the child's income share is significantly negative for those who stay, positive for those who leav
Aiding Violence or Peace? The Impact of Foreign Aid on the Risk of Civil Conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa
No full textThis paper considers the impact of foreign aid on the risk of civil conflict. Previous studies on this topic have not properly addressed the problem of endogeneity between aid and conflict as well as the distorting influences of country specific time invariant effects. We propose GDP levels of donor countries as new and powerful instruments for foreign aid flows in the conflict regression. Aid flows are often defined as a fixed percentage of Donor’s GDP hence they are strongly correlated. Changes in donor GDP constitute an exogenous shock to aid received by developing countries, in the sense that it is unrelated to the endogenous aid allocation process. Hence, the identification strategy does not pick up covariation due to aid rationing in the prelude to war. In addition, we condition on a number of macro factors to rule out other possible channels through which donor GDP affects conflict. We find a statistically significant and economically important negative effect of foreign aid on the risk of civil conflict. We estimate that a ten percent increase in foreign aid decreases the risk of civil conflict by six to nine percent using different specifications
Goodwill, Excess Returns, and Determinants of Value Creation and Overpayment
No full textIn this article we have investigated whether the determinants of excess returns (especially of target excess returns) are valid for purchased goodwill as well. Among them are acquirer’s and target’s Tobin’s q, and debt assets ratio, that explain value creation of acquisitions, and relative size, source of financing of the acquisition, number of bidders, and relatedness of businesses of acquiror and target, that explain overpayment or overvaluation of acquisitions. The study is confined to mergers and acquisitions between US publicly quoted companies announced and effective in between January 2002 and December 2005. Databases used are SDC Platinum, CRSP and Compustat industrial annual file. Goodwill amounts are derived from acquirer’s 10-K forms in Edgar database of SEC. Results show that in line with our expectations, the correlation coefficient for target excess return amounts and goodwill is positive, whereas it is negative for acquirer and combined excess returns. Further it turns out that goodwill is significant positively influenced by acquisitions of high Tobin’s q targets by either low or high Tobin’s q acquirers, compared to acquisitions of low Tobin’s q targets by low Tobin’s q acquirers. Also the method of payment matters: payments other than cash or stock negatively influence goodwill. Moreover, a higher leverage of the target positively influences purchased goodwill. Although some of the determinants of excess return have a significant influence on goodwill, the pattern is sometimes different. Therefore, further research needs to take into account both the nature of goodwill and its unique determinants
The Part-Time Wage Penalty : A Career Perspective
Full text linkPart-time employment has become an extremely popular work arrangement in the
Netherlands because it renders employment compatible with non-work activities. We posit
that there may be a downside to part-time employment, which is related to its negative effects
on workers? career. This may be the case when firms use promotions to stimulate skill
acquisition and human capital accumulation or when they base their work incentive schemes
on performance measures that are affected by the number of hours worked or when they
screen workers on the basis of the number of hours worked. Because promotions are an
important source of wage growth, the low incidence of promotion among part-time workers
may contribute to the emergence of the part-time wage penalty (i.e., the wage difference
between a part-time worker and an otherwise equal full-time worker) in due time. Consistent
with this view, we find that (male and female) workers in part-time jobs are characterized by a
lower incidence of promotion relative to workers in full-time jobs and that promotions account
for a wage growth of eight log points. Moreover, we find that the part-time wage penalty does
not arise at the onset of a career as young workers join the labor market but that it tends to
develop over time as labor market experience and the effect of missed promotions cumulate
Price-settings and Price Dispersion in the Dutch Mortgage Market
No full textWe analyse empirically price-setting in the Dutch mortgage market, using information on about 124,000 Dutch households and 54 mortgage lenders over the years 1996-2001. For a narrowly defined set of mortgages (which have a fixed lending rate for ten years), the range of the lending rate between lenders varies between 0.86 and 1.24 percentage points over these years. Prices remain dispersed across lenders, even after controlling for the characteristics of the household and the municipality (1 percentage point). We find that the price dispersion of mortgages sold by banks is smaller than that of mortgages sold by life insurers (0.60 versus 1.28 percentage points). This difference may be due to lower agency costs for banks than for life insurers. Another likely explanation is that the market segment for banks is more transparent than that of insurance companies. This may imply that there is imperfect competition among lenders, so that some of them can develop market power. Furthermore, we find indications for market power since lenders with higher costs have higher lending rates, accounting for a maximum change of the lending rate by 0.076 – 0.16 percentage point
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