VoxEU Column
Wilte Zijlstra is a supervision officer at the Consumer Behavior team in the Centre of Expertise of the Dutch Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM). The AFM is the market conduct supervisor of the Netherlands. He has worked at the AFM for over 10 years on various (supervisory) projects, ranging from work on investment products, mortgages, and consumer credit, to insurance and pensions. Prominent is all of his work has been the drive to give voice to the (financial) consumer via (market) research to further improve the supervision and regulatory practices of the AFM.The Consumer Behavior team strives for evidence based, effective rules and regulations. The team also aims to counter evil nudges and give positive guidance to choice architecture by regulated firms. Using a realistic perspective of human behavior, we want to measure -scientifically sound- the effectiveness of different interventions, preferably in field experiments.Wilte Zijlstra has a PhD in Evolutionary Biology (2002) from the University of Leiden, the Netherlands. Before joining the AFM in 2006, he worked at a health insurance company, and taught biology.