Vera Lubbersen is a theoretical financial economist specialising in money, banking, and payment systems. She is currently a PhD candidate at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where her research is supervised by Prof. Dr. Wilko Bolt, Prof. Dr. Olaf Sleijpen, and Prof. Dr. Maarten van Oordt. Her doctoral work studies the industrial organisation of payments, analysing how pricing, incentives, and innovation shape competition and market structure in payment markets.
Alongside her academic work, Vera is an economist at De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB), where she works on payments policy, financial market infrastructures, and emerging technologies. She has contributed to international policy discussions on tokenisation, crypto assets, and central bank digital currencies.
Her research combines formal economic modelling with policy relevant questions. In her work on payment card markets, including Locked out by loyalty: entry deterrence through rebates in payment card markets, she shows how rebates and incentive payments can be used strategically by incumbent card networks to deter entry, raise merchant fees, and entrench market dominance—offering new insights for competition and payments regulation.
Vera’s work has been presented at leading international conferences and central banks, and her research has been published in academic journals, central bank working papers, and policy outlets.
