We provide a general characterization of the structure of rational expectations equilibria of any degree of revelation for pure exchange, sequential economies, with deffinitely many states of private information, an incomplete financial market and nominal assets. We estimate the dimension of the...

This paper discusses a wide range of indicators of the degree of integration of the euro area banking system. It is concerned with volume data, a less developed field of research compared with studies on prices/rates. We first set out a methodological framework, a mixture of elementary and more...

This paper identifies the empirical stylized features of price setting behaviour in Portugal using the micro-datasets underlying the consumer and the producer price indexes. The main conclusions are the following: 1 in every 4 prices change each month; there is a considerable degree of...

Based upon a large fraction of the price records used for computing the French CPI, we document consumer price rigidity in France. We first provide a methodological discussion of issues involved in estimating average price duration with micro-data. The average duration of prices in the sectors...

This paper reports the results of a survey conducted by the Banque de France during Winter 2003-2004 to investigate the price-setting behavior of French manufacturing companies. Prices are found to adjust infrequently; the median firm modifies its price only once a year. Price reviews are more...

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...

We study the effect of government encouraged or mandated interchange fee ceilings on consumer and merchant adoption and usage of payment cards in an economy where card acceptance is far from complete. We believe that we are the first to use bank-level data to study the impact of interchange fee...

We investigate the wage-setting behavior of French companies using an ad-hoc survey conducted specifically for this study. Our main results are the following. i) Wages are changed infrequently. The mean duration of wage contracts is one year. Wage changesoccur at regular intervals during the...

The paper analyzes how the removal of barriers to entry in banking affect loan competition, bank stability and economic welfare. We consider a model of spatial loan competition where a market that is served by less efficient banks is opened to entry by banks that are more efficient in screening...