This article investigates the factors that have induced and shaped the process of industry evolution of banking in the United Kingdom and, in particular, the reorganization of the retail payments system. It will look at how the effects of technical progress within a changing regulatory framework...

This paper analyses market competition between two different types of credit card platforms: not-for-profit associations and proprietary systems. The main focus is on the role of the interchange fee set by not-for-profit platforms. We show that when the interchange fee is set so as to maximise...

The primary purpose of this article is to investigate the relationship between bank capital and credit risk taking in emerging market economies. We also investigate the influence of several regulatory, institutional and legal features on the relationship between risk and capital. We apply a...

The UK experienced a major residential real estate boom-bust cycle from the mid-Eighties to the mid-Nineties, accompanied by unprecedented shifts in the owner occupancy rate of young households. Previous empirical analyses have pointed toward income changes and financial deregulation as the...

Bulgaria is a small South-eastern European country with a population of 8 million inhabitants in economic transition. During the bank crisis (1996-97) about 1/3 of all banks went bankrupt. On 5 July 1997, the Bulgarian government, jointly with IMF, introduced the Currency Board Arrangement,...

The thrust of current deposit insurance reform--risk-based insurance premiums and capital requirements--is an effort to price deposit insurance more fairly. Fairly pricing deposit insurance eliminates inequitable wealth transfers, but it does not lead to an efficient equilibrium. This paper...

In a finite-trader version of the Diamond-Dybvig (1983) model, the symmetric, ex-ante efficient allocation is implementable by a direct mechanism (i.e., each trader announces the type of his own ex-post preference) in which truthful revelation is the strictly dominant strategy for each trader....

The new information technologies adoption and e-commerce emergence change the role of financial intermediaries in new E-conomy. During the last years, the banks have started an expansion to the web – they offer broad range of traditional bank products and services via Internet. The remote...

This article studies how equity ownership and corporate control were separated in the United States. Initially, railroads and industrial firms were tightly controlled by a few shareholders; this situation was altered in the 1890s by massive mergers and reorganizations, which allowed private...

In this paper we investigate the coherence between bank ratings and default probability in emerging market economies using scoring and mapping techniques. In order to achieve its disciplining role, the rating should be coherent with the default risk it summarizes and disseminate. This issue is...