This paper examines the fundamental relationship between retail payments and overall economic growth. Using data from across 27 European markets over the period 1995–2009, the results confirm that migration to efficient electronic retail payments stimulates overall economic growth, consumption...

We show that the impact of government bailouts (liquidity injections) on a representative bank's risk taking depends on the level of systematic risk of its loans portfolio. In a model where bank's output follows a geometric Brownian motion and the government guarantees bank's liabilities, we...

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...

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...

We investigate how borrowers' corporate governance influences bank loan contracting terms in emerging markets and how this relation varies across countries with different country-level governance. We find that borrowers with stronger corporate governance obtain favorable contracting terms with...

Persistent shifts in equilibria are likely to arise in oligopolistic markets and may be detrimental to the measurement of conduct, related markups and intensity of competition. We develop a cointegrated VAR (vector autoregression) based approach to detect long-run changes in conduct when data...

In the market for payment media, some consumers use only one medium when paying for their point-of-sale transactions, while others use many. This pattern reflects the diffusion of new payment media, because a payment method innovation is typically first used simultaneously with the established...

We study the effect of bank loan and bond announcements on borrower's stock price. We apply an event study methodology on a sample of companies from 17 European countries and find that debt announcement generates a positive stock market reaction. However, our main conclusion is that the issuance...

This paper presents a descriptive analysis of the primary and secondary market for Finnish treasury bonds. The paper focuses on three issues. First, we report basic descriptive statistics such as auction volumes and secondary market yields and volumes. Second, we estimate the revenues earned by...