Studies by the Reserve Bank undertaken from 2000 to 2002 concluded that the structure of pricing in the Australian card payments system was encouraging inefficient use of credit cards relative to EFTPOS. From 2003, therefore, the Bank progressively introduced reforms to address this issue:...

Credit cards provide benefits to consumers and merchants not provided by other payment instruments as evidenced by their explosive growth in the number and value of transactions over the last 20 years. Recently, credit card networks have come under scrutiny from regulators and antitrust...

Open payment card networks typically coordinate the activities of thousands of financial institutions that issue cards, millions of retail locations that accept them, and several hundred million consumers that use them. This coordination can include the collective setting of certain prices and...

Although an inverse relationship between sickness absence and unemployment has been documented in a number of studies using either quarterly or annual data from different countries with varying institutional frameworks, it is not yet clear whether this empirical regularity is due to changes in...

From the mid 1980's, the Canadian government froze or cut back the major traditional provisions targeted towards families with children. Faced with the lowest (and declining) fertility rate in Canada, the government of the province of Québec (where the population is mostly French) decided in...

The hosting and bidding for the Olympic Games is a natural experiment to test for anticipation effects in macroeconomics. We examine these effects using panel data for 184 countries during the period 1950-2006. We find that hosting the Games generates positive investment, consumption, and output...

Stereotypes, role models played by teachers and social norms influence girls' academic self-concept and push girls to choose humanities rather than science. Do recruiters reinforce this strong selection by discriminating more against girls in more scientific subjects? Using the entrance exam of...

We analyze the impact of a freeway interchange collapse in the San Francisco Bay Area on the difference in airfare quotes for travel into the area’s main airports. The incident temporarily made Oakland airport a less attractive choice for traveling to San Francisco, so we hypothesize that...