As the financial and physical markets for energy have increasingly become intertwined, energy trade is also covered by financial legislation. The European Commission wishes to strengthen this financial regulation of energy trade. It has put forward a set of regulatory proposals aimed at...

While the "cashless society" has not yet fully become a reality, payment choices by consumers and merchants have been moving the U.S. economy in that direction slowly and steadily over the past five decades. In this study, a companion paper to Garcia-Swartz (2006a) in this volume, we lay out the...

Ever since the first general-purpose charge card debuted in the early 1950s, pundits have been predicting the "cashless society". Over fifty years later, we may finally be getting close to that vision. This study is the first to examine empirically the move toward a cashless society using a...

We survey the limited data that exists concerning the cost of making/receiving a payment by banks, retailers, and other parties to a transaction. Since an electronic payment costs between one-third and one-half that of a paper-based instrument, a country may save 1% of its GDP annually as it...