CPB Discussion paper
À partir de janvier 2019 les publications ne sont plus numérotées (dernière publication numérotée novembre 2018 n° 387)
December 2019
- Limitation of holding structures for intra-EU dividends: A blow to tax avoidance?
- The effects of the increase in the retirement age in the Netherlands
- SVARs, the central bank balance sheet and the effects of unconventional monetary policy in the euro area
September 2019
August 2019
July 2019
June 2019
- Dutch Shell Companies and International Tax Planning
- Non-Bunching at Kinks and Notches in Cash Transfers
- Estimating the Impact of the Financial Cycle on Fiscal Policy
May 2019
- Experimenting with dropout prevention policies
- Transit-oriented developments and residential property values
April 2019
Can your house keep you out of a nursing home?
DIEPSTRATEN Maaike, DOUVEN Rudy, WOUTERSE Bram
Older people living in houses that are accessible for people with mobility problems have a lower probability to move to a nursing home than similar persons living in less accessible houses. This effect increases with age and is stronger for persons with physical limitations than for persons with cognitive limitations.
Policies focused on improving the accessibility of houses can contribute to ageing in place.
Do house prices matter for household consumption?
ZHANG Lu
Real house prices in the Netherlands peaked in 2008 and have since then fallen by about 27% until the end of 2013. Aggregate household consumption dropped by 7% during 2008-2013. To what extent have large declines in house prices driven household consumption after the crisis? What are the underlying channels at work? These are the key questions of this paper.
On the macro level the drop in consumption of households who have negative home equity has the biggest impact on macro consumption, because their number sharply increased during the crisis. Precautionary savings motives appear to contribute most to the decline.
Disentangling the effect of household debt on consumption
JI Kan, TEULINGS Rutger, WOUTERSE Bram
We estimate the contemporaneous relationship between household debt and consumption during the crisis. We find that average consumption of households with high debt has decreased much more than that of other households. We disentangle this into an effect through the availability of credit for direct consumption and through household debt overhang. On the micro level, the decline is sharpest for the households who are less able to finance one-off high consumption with new debts.
On the macro level the drop in consumption of households who have negative home equity has the biggest impact on macro consumption, because their number sharply increased during the crisis. Precautionary savings motives appear to contribute most to the decline.
The welfare effects of co-payments in long term care
WOUTERSE Bram, HUSSEM Arjen, WONG Albert
We use a non-parametric nearest-neighbor approach to estimate lifecycle paths of long term care spending for the Dutch older population. The estimated paths are used as inputs in a stochastic lifecycle decision model for singles at the retirement age. With the model, we evaluate the effects of the Dutch income- and wealth-dependent co-payment system. We compare the current system to a co-payment that only depends on income and a flat-rate co-payment, independent of financial means.
The Dutch system offers substantial protection against high costs for middle income groups, compared to a flat-rate co-payment. Only the group with the highest financial means would benefit from the introduction of a flat-rate co-payment.
March 2019
Forecast March 2019 (CEP 2019)
VAN GEEST Laura, VAN VUUUREN Daniel
The high growth rate of the Dutch economy is over. For both this year and the next, GDP growth is projected at 1.5%, following years of growth percentages of over 2%. International trade is increasing at a slower rate, which is reflected by Dutch exports that are projected to grow substantially less rapidly in 2019 and 2020, compared to previous years. International uncertainties, such as US trade policy, Brexit and the state of the Chinese economy, have a negative impact on the economy. The budget also is projected to contribute by less than initially planned. Despite the lower growth levels, unemployment will stay low, purchasing power will increase and government finance remains under control.
Estimating Markups in the Netherlands
VAN HEUVELEN Gerrit Hugo, BETTENDORF Leon, MEIJERINK Gerdien
This research is part of a series of papers in which the productivity slowdown and its possible causes for the Netherlands are analysed. A previous study (Grabska et al., 2017) finds that, as in many OECD countries, productivity growth in the Netherlands is slowing down. Subsequently, we analyse the dynamics of firms on the productivity frontier and laggard firms (See van Heuvelen et al., 2018 and Meijerink et al., 2018). We find no indication of divergence taking place between the most productive firms (frontier firms) and less productive firms (laggards) in terms of productivity over time.
Selection and moral hazard effects in healthcare
REMMERSWAAL Minke, BOONE Jan, DOUVEN Rudy
In the Netherlands, average healthcare expenditures of persons without a voluntary deductible are twice as high as average healthcare expenditures of persons with a voluntary deductible. When assessing the effects of voluntary cost-sharing in healthcare on healthcare expenditures, it is important to disentangle moral hazard from selection: are healthcare expenditures low because people pay (a bigger share of) their healthcare expenditures out-of-pocket? Or are people with higher cost-sharing levels healthier? In this study, we separate selection from moral hazard for the combined mandatory and voluntary deductible in the Netherlands. We use proprietary claims data from Dutch health insurers and exploit with a panel regression discontinuity design that we can observe healthcare expenditures before and after the deductibles kick in for 18 year olds. Our study shows that selection, not moral hazard, is the main effect explaining the difference in healthcare expenditures between persons with and without a voluntary deductible. Furthermore, we find that 18 year olds who never chose a voluntary deductible reduce their healthcare spending by 26 euros (on average) in response to a 100 euro increase in the (mandatory) deductible. However, for 18 year olds who chose a voluntary deductible (on top of the mandatory) we find that this choice does not result in a further reduction in healthcare spending.
Preliminary Forecast March 2019 (cCEP 2019)
The economy is cooling. The high growth rate of the Dutch economy is over. For both this year and the next, GDP growth is projected at 1.5%, following years of growth percentages of over 2%. International trade is increasing at a slower rate, which is reflected by Dutch exports that are projected to grow substantially less rapidly in 2019 and 2020, compared to previous years. International uncertainties, such as US trade policy, Brexit and the state of the Chinese economy, have a negative impact on the economy. The budget also is projected to contribute by less than initially planned. Despite the lower growth levels, unemployment will stay low, purchasing power will increase and government finance remains under control. These are the conclusions published today by CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis, as included in its projections in the Central Economic Plan 2019 (CEP).
February 2019
Do parents work more when children start school? Evidence from the Netherlands
SWART Lisette, VAN DEN BERGE Wiljan, VAN DER WIEL Karen
When children start school, parents save time and/or money. In this paper, we empirically examine the impact of these changes to the family's budget constraint on parents' working hours. Labor supply is theoretically expected to increase for parents who used to spend time taking care of their children, but to decrease for fulltime working parents because of an income effect: child care expenses drop. We show that the effect of additional time dominates the income effect in the Netherlands, where children start school (kindergarten) for approximately 20 hours a week in the month that they turn 4. Using detailed administrative data on all parents, we fi nd that the average mother's hours worked increases by 3% when her youngest child starts going to school. For their partners, who experience a much smaller shock in terms of time, the increase in hours worked is also much smaller at 0.4%.
Do zero and sign restricted SVARs identify unconventional monetary policy shocks in the euro area?
ELBOURNE Adam, JI Kan
This research re-examines the findings of the existing literature on the effects of unconventional monetary policy. It concludes that the existing estimates based on vector autoregressions in combination with zero and sign restrictions do not successfully isolate unconventional monetary policy shocks from other shocks impacting the euro area economy. In our research, we show that altering existing published studies by making the incorrect assumption that expansionary monetary shocks shrink the ECB’s balance sheet or even ignoring all information about the stance of monetary policy results in the same shocks and, therefore, the same estimated responses of output and prices. As a consequence, it is implausible that the shocks previously identified in the literature are true unconventional monetary policy shocks. Since correctly isolating unconventional monetary policy shocks is a prerequisite for subsequently estimating the effects of unconventional monetary policy shocks, the conclusions from previous vector autoregression models are unwarranted. We show this lack of identification for different specifications of the vector autoregression models and different sample periods.
Automatic Reaction – What Happens to Workers at Firms that Automate
VAN DEN BERGE Wiljan
We provide the first estimate of the impacts of automation on individual workers by combining Dutch micro-data with a direct measure of automation expenditures covering firms in all private non-financial industries over 2000-2016. Using an event study differences-indifferences design, we find that automation at the firm increases the probability of workers separating from their employers and decreases days worked, leading to a 5-year cumulative wage income loss of about 8% of one year’s earnings for incumbent workers.
( texte intégral)January 2019
The impact of age at arrival on education and mental health
GERRITSEN Sander, KATTENBERG Mark, KUIJPERS Sonny
Given the importance of education and mental health for labor market performance, we study how these outcomes are affected by the age at which refugees arrive in the country. We identify the causal impact of age at arrival by comparing siblings who share the same family background characteristics, but arrive at different ages. Given the importance of education and mental health for labor market performance, we study how these outcomes are affected by the age at which refugees arrive in the country. We identify the causal impact of age at arrival by comparing siblings who share the same family background characteristics, but arrive at different ages. We find significant and meaningful impacts of age at arrival on educational attainment, but not on mental health. Arriving one year earlier increases the probability to obtain a higher educational degree by 3.6 percentage points. We find this impact to be stronger for girls than for boys. We do not find evidence suggesting that the impact of age at arrival becomes more pronounced after a specific age. Our findings carry important policy implications for the allocation of scarce resources available for integration of refugees as we show that refugee children who arrive at an older age will have substantially reduced educational outcomes compared to those who arrive at a younger age. This also implies that child refugees arriving via family reunification would benefit substantially from reductions in asylum application processing time, even if realized reductions are small.
Conduit country the Netherlands in the spotlight
LEJOUR Arjan, MÖHLMANN Jan, VAN 'T RIET Maarten
The Netherlands is an important link in the chain of diverting income flows: broader use of withholding taxes is necessary to combat international tax avoidance. Sixty percent of the royalties that flow via the Netherlands go directly to tax haven Bermuda. Outgoing interest flows are diverted less often to tax havens: around 20 percent. In addition, some 25% of the outgoing interest flows to other conduit countries, such as Ireland, Luxemburg and Switzerland. In addition, a large share of dividends comes from these countries. The conditional withholding tax, planned for 2021, does not stop the financial flows from and to other conduit countries. The reason for this is that the conditional withholding tax only applies to countries with a statutory rate of the corporate income tax of 9 percent or less. That does not include Ireland, Luxemburg and Switzerland.
The Incidence of Pension Contributions: What matters: marginal or average rates?
BOSCH Nicole, VAN EWIJK Casper, MICEVSKA SCHARF Maja, MUNS Sander
This paper investigates the incidence of pension contributions using a unique longitudinal administrative dataset covering individual employees at different pension funds in the Netherlands for the period 2006-2012. With a panel-based difference-indifference approach, we estimate the response of wages, labor cost and hours worked to both marginal and average contribution rates, which provides us insight into the mechanisms underlying incidence.
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