We consider whether banks should be allowed to set different ATM prices to their customers depending on whether they hold an account on the bank. In Massoud and Bernhardt (2002), without considering an interchange fee, a ban on price discrimination on ATM services increases total surplus. In the...

This paper presents evidence on the impact of bank-specific, regulatory, institutional, macro and financial development variables on competition in banking, using information at both national and bank level. With this aim, Lerner indices of market power are estimated using a sample of 10,479...

The analysis of bank accounting ratios as indicators of competitiveness has been complemented and occasionally revised by the increasing use of more sophisticated indices ofefficiency. In recent years, over a hundred studies have analysed the efficiency of financial institutions, concentrating...

This paper analyses the effect of bank relationships on the interest rate and personaland real guarantees borne by a sample of small and medium-sized enterprises in theirindebtedness. The results of this paper indicate that the SMEs that work with fewer financialintermediaries obtain debt at a...

This paper tests Bester's (1985, 1987) prediction about the separating role ofcontracts that involve both interest rates and collateral in credit markets. To test thisprediction we use data from natural credit markets and controlled experiments. Using asample of credits to small and medium size...

It is well known that the profitability of horizontal mergers with quantity competition is scarce. However, in an asymmetric Stackelberg market we obtain that some mergers are profitable. Our main result is that mergers among followers become profitable when the followers are inefficient enough....

In this paper we consider the effect of union structure on the adoption of innovation in the context of Cournot duopoly. With a market size large enough we show that the incentive to innovate is higher under a decentralized union structure (with each firm facing its own independent union) than...

I analyze the implications of bundling on price competition in a market with complementary products. Using a model of imperfect competition with product differentiation, I identify the incentives to bundle for two types of demand functions and study how they change with the size of the bundle....

We analyze the roles of the government and the incumbent in preventing piracy, and the reasons and incentives why a pirate would want to be a leader in prices. The framework of analysis used is a duopoly model of vertical product differentiation with price competition, where both incumbent and...

In this paper we analyze firms' ability to tacitly collude on pricesin an infinitely repeated duopoly game of vertical productdifferentiation. We show that firms collude if and only if their discountfactor is high enough, i.e. if they value future profits sufficiently. We alsoshow that a lower...