We analyze for the first time cash holdings of private households in all euro area countries from 2002 to 2019 within a panel cointegration framework. Besides the traditional determinants of cash demand like transactions balances and opportunity costs, we concentrate on cashless payments media...

Do digital payment technologies generate liquidity premia like cash and Treasury? We provide an estimate in the context of the world's largest digital payment platform, Alipay. Our empirical strategy exploits the variation in the timing of the introduction of money market funds that users on...

The Covid-19 pandemic has been a shock to retail payment behaviour. How have the changes differed across countries? What do they imply for the future of cash and digital payments? We assemble a new "Future of Payments" database on retail payment behaviour for up to 95 countries over September...

We argue that anticorruption laws may provide an efficiency rationale for why political parties should meddle in the distribution of political nominations and government contracts. Anticorruption laws forbid trade in spoils that politicians distribute. However, citizens may pay for gaining...

We study the choice of club membership, when member-countries national governments set their tax policies non-cooperatively. Federal policy (in the form of club membership) has a higher constitutional status than national policies (in the form of income tax rates). This allows federal policy to...

This paper provides an economic explanation for the increasing reliance of the state on revenue from user charges on excludable public goods. We develop a model with many identical countries. The government of each country levies a capital tax on the domestic production sector and supplies an...

We develop a two-region model where the decentralized provision of spillover goods can be financed by means of taxes or user fees. In order to enforce the fees regions have to invest in exclusion. We show that a decentralized solution tends to be inefficient. There will be over-investment in...

Blockchains, the technology underlying cryptocurrencies, face large fluctuations in user demand and marginal costs. These fluctuations make effective fee policies necessary to manage transaction service allocation. This paper models the conflict between the blockchain designer and validators...

This paper generalizes the frequently used Hotelling model for two-sided markets in order to determine the equilibrium market shares. We show that advertisement levels depend neither on the media price nor on the location of the media firm. An increase in advertising revenues does not change...