This paper investigates the existence and extent of economies of scale in the European payment processing industry. It is expected that the creation of a single European payments area (SEPA) will spur consolidations and mergers among European payment processors to more fully realize payment...

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...

In card payment systems, no-surcharge rules prohibit merchants from charging consumers extra for card payments. However, such rules are prohibited in the Netherlands. Dutch retailers are allowed to surcharge consumers for debit card use. This setting permits an empirical analysis of the impact...

This paper contributes to the literature on the relation between bank profitability and economic activity. When allowing for stronger co-movement of bank profit with economic activity during deep recessions, we find a much larger impact of output growth on bank profitability than commonly found...