Credit card transactions cost American merchants six times as much as cash transactions. Why, then, do consumers pay the same price for purchases, regardless of the means of payment?The answer lies in a set of credit card network rules known as merchant restraints. Merchant restraints forbid...

Rationale Digitalisation has made significant headway in recent years, particularly following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Against this background, it is important to analyse how consumers’ payment habits are changing at the physical point of sale, online and person-to-person....

A two-stage estimation procedure is employed to evaluate non-bank financial institution efficiency. In the first stage, maximum-likelihood estimates of an econometric cost function are obtained for a cross-section of one hundred and fifty Australian credit unions. The results indicate that a...

With an increasingly open economic condition in Thailand, insurance firms exposed to competition should improve efficiency to ensure their survival. This paper examines the cost efficiency and its relationship with profitability of life insurance firms: Cobb-Douglas stochastic cost frontier...

This paper re-examines the evidence on how the listing of options impacts on underlying stock’s volatility by taking into consideration the possible presence of a learning effect, along with the impact of the very endogenous nature of the options listing decision itself. Our analyses are...

This paper examines a simple model of strategic interactions among firms that face at least some of the same rivals in two related markets (for goods 1 and 2). It shows that when firms compete in quantity, market prices increase as the degree of multi-market contact increases. However, the...

This study analyzes the structure of the water industry in Peru. It investigates economies of scale and cost inefficiencies in 43 water providers during the years from 1996 to 2005. Different water sources in different geographical regions directly affect the production technology of the sector,...

Since the open door policy was embarked upon in 1979, China s banking sector has undergone gradual but notable reforms. A key objective of the reforms implemented by the Chinese government is to build an effective, competitive and stable banking system in order to improve its efficiency and...

Over the last few decades, numerous studies have adopted efficiency and productivity techniques to examine and evaluate the overall performance of banking industries to inform policy effect as well as identify the best practice. The majority of banking efficiency and productivity studies focus...