The European banking industry joined forces to achieve a fully integrated market for retail payment services in the euro area: the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA). Against this background, the present paper examines the fundamental relationship between retail payment business and overall bank...

Payment scale economies affect banking costs, competition in payment services, and pricing. Our scale measure relates operating cost to physical measures of European banking "output", finding large economies. This differs from relating total cost to the value of balance sheet assets (the...

This paper analyzes the welfare implications of creating a Single Euro Payments Area. We study the effects of increased network compatibility and payment scale economies on consumer and merchant card fees and its impact on card usage. In particular, we model competition among debit cards and...

Standard transaction cost arguments can only partially explain why the share of cash transactions is still high in many countries. This paper shows that consumers' desire to monitor liquidity is one of the reasons. Consumers make use of a distinctive feature of cash - a glance into one's pocket...

We analyse the drivers of Bitcoin transactions against 44 fiat currencies in the largest peer-to-peer crypto exchanges. Momentum and volatility in the cryptoasset market, as well as volatility and liquidity in global financial markets do matter for Bitcoin trading. There is suggestive evidence...

Payments are a key focus of central banks, as - together with the safe, efficient operation of the payments market - wide access to cash is fundamentally important for a healthy economy. In this study, three main research areas were investigated: 1. socioeconomic characteristics that can be...