The 5th joint SUERF/Bank of Finland joint conference was held in Helsinki on 13 June 2013. The general theme of the conference was to focus on the regulatory reforms after the global financial crisis and, in particular, how structural reforms of banking ("Volcker, Vickers and Liikanen") could...

A Central Counterparty (CCP) is an entity that interposes itself between transacting counterparties – a seller vis-à-vis the original buyer and a buyer vis-à-vis the original seller – to guarantee execution of the transaction. Thus, the original transacting parties substitute their...

This is the first paper that examines economies of scale in stock exchanges. The data employed in the study include cost and output statistics for 37 stock exchanges in four continents around the world for the year 1997. I estimate two traditional cost functions and find that ray (overall) scale...

We study a financial market adverse selection model where all agents are endowed with initial wealth and choose to invest as entrepreneurs or financiers, or not to invest. We show that often a lack of outside finance leads to the emergence of financial markets where availability of outside...

Finnish payment methods have changed rapidly as payment cards have gained increasing popularity and have, to an extent, replaced cash. This article examines this phenomenon and the trends in cash and electronic payment methods in Finland. It starts with an introduction to the statistical data on...

This paper investigates the existence and extent of economies of scale and scope among stock exchanges. Evidence from 38 exchanges in 32 countries and 4 continents around the world for the years 1989-1998 indicates the existence of significant economies of scale and scope. The degree of such...

This paper provides an explanation of technical inefficiencies of financial exchanges in Europe as well as an empirical analysis of their existence and extent. A single-stage stochastic cost frontier approach is employed, which generates exchange inefficiency scores based on a unique unbalanced...

One of the most important recent innovations in financial markets has been the development of credit derivative products that allow banks to more actively manage their credit portfolios than ever before. We analyse the effect that access to these markets has had on the lending behaviour of a...

Cards and cash are competing payment instruments at point-of-sale. The twosided market platform theory, based on general benefit assumptions, supports the use of multilateral interchange fees for card payments as a means of promoting the use of cards. However, analysis of the issue from the...

We build a simple model to study service fee competition between an incumbent and an independent ATM deployer, and its optimal regulation. We use the model to analyze an actual regulation of such a market by competition authorities in Finland. We find that socially optimal first-best fees would...