We study the ability of banks and merchants to influence the consumer's payment instrument choice. Consumers participate in payment card networks to insure themselves against three types of shocks| income, theft, and their merchant match. Merchants choose which payment instruments to accept...

This paper considers the issue of forecasting financial fragility of banks and insurances using a panel data set of performance indicators, namely distance-to-default, taking unobserved common factors into account. We show that common factors are important in the performance of banks and...

We use focused interviews with bank managers to analyse how multinational banks use internal capital markets to control their subsidiaries. It is found that foreign bank affiliates are strongly influenced by the capital allocation and credit steering mechanisms of the parent bank. Parent banks...

On the basis of focused interviews with managers of foreign parent banks and their affiliates in Central Europe and the Baltic States, the development of small-business lending by foreign banks is analysed. Our approach allows us to complement the standard empirical literature, which has...

Macro stress-testing has become an important tool to assess financial stability. This paper describes a tool kit for scenario analysis and macro stress-testing. It is based on a model which maps multivariate scenarios to banks' credit and interest rate risks by deterministic and stochastic...

Over the last two decades, communication has become an increasingly importantaspect of monetary policy. These real-world developments have spawned a huge newscholarly literature on central bank communicationmostly empirical, and almost all of it written in this decade. We survey this...

This paper studies the impact of explicit deposit insurance on market discipline in a framework that resembles a natural experiment. We improve upon previous studies by exploiting a unique combination of country-specific circumstances, design features, and data availability that allows us to...

This paper analyses the impact of loan market competition on the interest rates applied by euro area banks to loans and deposits during the 1994-2004 period, using a novel measure of competition called the Boone indicator. We find evidence that stronger competition implies significantly lower...

Familiarity with working in a specific institutional environment compared to its competitors can provide a firm with a competitive advantage, making it invest in specific host countries. We examine whether this notion of institutional competitive advantage drives banks to seek out specific...

This paper develops a game theory model to analyze the optimal structure of the Lender of Last Resort in Europe. When depositors are imperfectly informed, the indifference to international transmission displayed by national authorities has value. A centralized authority, because it internalizes...