In a payment card association such as Visa, each time a consumer pays by card, the bank of the merchant (acquirer) pays an interchange fee (IF) to the bank of the cardholder (issuer) to carry out the transaction. This paper studies the determinants of socially and privately optimal IFs in a card...

Payment card networks, such as Visa, require merchants' banks to pay substantial quot;interchangequot; fees to cardholders' banks, on a per transaction basis. This paper shows that a network's profit-maximizing fee induces an inefficient price structure, over-subsidizing card usage and...

Macroeconomic studies suggest that employment-output elasticities in the euro area increased during the recovery from the crisis, especially in those countries that implemented reforms. In this paper, we use micro (individual-level) data from the Eurostat Labour Force Survey to investigate...

The paper analyses the impact of import penetration on firms' profitability in 15 manufacturing industries in 10 euro area countries during 1995-2004, focusing on the role of emerging market economies. Our results indicate that import competition from emerging market economies has had an overall...

We quantify the impact that central bank refinancing operations and funding facilities had at reducing the banking sector’s intrinsic fragility in the euro area in 2014-2019. We do so by constructing, estimating and calibrating a micro-structural model of imperfect competition in the banking...