The developed world exhibits substantial but poorly understood differences in the efficiency and quality of low-value payment services.This paper compares payments arrangements in the UK, Norway, Sweden, and Finland, and discusses the impact of network effects on incentives to adopt new payments...

This paper studies how comparing can be used to provide information in financial markets in the presence of a hidden characteristics problem.Although an investor cannot precisely estimate the future returns of an entrepreneur's projects, the investor can mitigate the asymmetric information...

We study the adverse selection problem in imperfectly competitive credit markets and illustrate the circumstances where a separating equilibrium emerges, even without collateral.The borrowers are heterogeneous in their preferences concerning the banks.Separation obtains in market segments where...

The solvency standards implicit in bank capital levels, as reported eg in Jackson et al (2002), are much higher than those required for top ratings, if standard single period economic capital models are taken seriously.We explain this excess capital puzzle by forward looking rating targeting...

Although innovative credit risk transfer techniques help to allocate risk more optimally, policy-makers worry that they may detrimentally affect the effort spent by financial intermediaries in screening and monitoring credit exposures.This paper examines the equity market's response to loan...

This discussion paper presents a microsimulation model of household distress. We use logit analysis to estimate the extent to which a household's risk of being financially distressed depends on net income after tax and loan servicing costs. The impact of assumed macroeconomic shocks on this net...

This paper presents evidence on the impact of managers on cost efficiency in banking. Stochastic frontier analysis is applied to a unique Finnish data set. The paper finds that manager age and education have strong yet complicated effects. University education enhances efficiency if the manager...

This paper tests the hypothesis that the more fragile a banking system is, the more likely it is to experience problems when an unexpected shock hits. The empirical framework where this test is conducted is a reduced form model, where macroeconomic factors explain banks' loan losses. The...

Since the introduction of the single currency in 1999, major progress has been made towards achieving an integrated European capital and financial market. Available evidence suggests, nevertheless, that the degree of integration varies greatly depending on market segment. Retail banking markets...

Building on Cecchetti and Li (2005), we show that the bank lending channel affects monetary policy trade-offs only when interest rates affect marginal costs of production (ie when there is a cost channel of monetary policy) in the New Keynesian monetary policy model. In our calibrated model the...