While we agree that personal financial incentives (PFIs) may have some utility in public health interventions to motivate people in the uptake and persistence of health behaviour, we disagree with some of the sentiments outlined by Lynagh and colleagues [Lynagh, M. C., Sanson-Fisher, R. W., & Bonevski, B. (2013). What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Guiding principles for the use o...

BACKGROUND The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) increased levels of financial strain, especially in those of low socioeconomic status (SES). Financial strain can affect smoking behaviour. This study examines socioeconomic inequalities in current smoking and smoking cessation in The Netherlands before and during the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). METHODS Participants were 66,960 Dutch adults (≥ 1...

a r t i c l e i n f o The literature on short-selling restrictions focusses mainly on a ban's impact on market efficiency, liquidity and overpricing. Surprisingly, little is known about the effects of short-sale constraints on herd behaviour. Since institutional investors have come to dominate mature stock markets and rely extensively on short sales, constraining these traders may influence the...

We consider a mean-variance hedging (MVH) problem for an arbitrage-free large financial market, i.e. a financial market with countably many risky assets modelled by a sequence of continuous semimartingales. By using the stochastic integration theory for a sequence of semimartingales developed in De Donno and Pratelli (2003), we extend the results about change of numéraire and MVH of Gourieroux,...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the financing behaviour of Dutch corporations and its impact on firm performance. First, I present some stylised facts of corporate financing in the Netherlands. I show how the Dutch financial system differs from other major financial systems. Second, I analyse the valuation effect of different types of security offerings made by Dutch quoted firms. An ev...

The 1991 reforms to the UK NHS created a group of buyers of hospital care from amongst primary care physicians. The implementation of the reforms was such that these buyers had incentives to increase their use of hospital services prior to entering the scheme in order to inflate their budgets. It has been argued that non-financial motives would limit such behaviour. The paper shows that these h...

During the past year the Bank has continued to conduct research on a range of issues related to its areas of policy responsibility. Some of the major themes in 1996 were monetary policy and inflation, the behaviour of financial markets, international macroeconomic linkages, and developments in the Australian financial system. Results of this research are made available to the public in a number...

This study assesses the long-run behaviour of long-term sovereign bond yields in OECD countries, for the period 1973-2008. We employ a dynamic panel approach, to reflect financial and economic integration, and to increase the performance and accuracy of the tests. Given the existence of cross-country dependence regarding the sovereign bond segment of the financial markets and its determinants, ...

Abstract. The development of a methodology that could be used for the measurement of strategic long-term financial risks is becoming an important task. Existing modelling instruments allow for a good measurement of market risks of trading books over relatively small time intervals. However, these approaches might have some severe deficiencies if they are applied to longer time periods. In this ...

Financial markets are a paradigmatic case of complex adaptive systems. However, their complexity cannot be captured by traditional modelisation paradigms and we thus need to turn to new modelling tools. We present agentbased simulation as the suitable paradigm to analyse financial markets: this method allows to study the market macro behaviour on the basis of its microstructure, and some advanc...