Pricing should speed up the substitution of low cost electronic payments for expensive paper-based transactions and cash. But by how much? Norway has explicitly priced individual payment transactions and rapidly shifted to electronic payments while the Netherlands has experienced the same shift...

There are numerous ways to indicate the degree of banking competition across countries. Antitrust authorities rely on the structure-conduct-performance paradigm while academics prefer price mark-ups (Lerner index) or correlations of input costs with output prices (H-statistic). These measures...

Debit cards in Europe replace many medium value cash payments while stored value cards were designed to replace small value cash transac-tions. Unit cost considerations dictated a two-card (or single card) dual technology approach to cash replacement since unit costs were too high to use debit...

The three main measures of competition (HHI, Lerner Index, and H-Statistic) are uncorrelated for U.S. banks. We investigate why this occurs, propose a frontier measure of competition, and apply it to five major bank service lines using data only available since 2008. Fee-based banking services...

Banks supply payment services that underpin the smooth operation of the economy. To ensure an efficient payment system, it is important to maintain competition among payment service providers but data available to gauge the degree of competition are quite limited. We propose and implement a...

We assess the competitiveness of the $400 billion dollar U.S. bank consumer loan market by comparing results from different competition measures-HHI, Lerner Index, H-Statistic along with three others, two of which are related to frontier analysis. These measures are typically weakly related to...

This paper discusses various theoretic concepts which play a role in assessing the public benefits of Target, the large value RTGS payment network operated by the Eurosystem. These concepts touch upon natural monopoly, network externalities, competition and contestability, as well as economies...