Over the past two decades, the financial services industry has experienced a significant increase in competition and internal rivalry. Driven by deregulation and advances in information technologies, many historical institutional distinctions among financial intermediaries have disappeared or...

[...]In dem Diskussionspapier geht es um die Frage, ob die Empfehlung den nationalen Regulierungsbehörden genügend Freiraum einräumt, nationale Besonderheiten in ihren Marktanalysen zu berücksichtigen. Im Rahmen dieses Diskussionsbeitrages wird zu-nächst kurz die Relevante-Markt-Empfehlung...

[...]In this article, we demonstrate how such industry-specific realexchange rates can be constructed and present the recent pathsof these indexes. We next present three basic real exchange ratemeasures for each industry: one using export partner weightsonly, a second using import partner...

In the view of most policymakers and economists,competition in retail banking takes place in localmarkets covering a relatively small geographic area.Banks are thought to design their services and settheir loan and deposit rates in response to the supply anddemand conditions prevailing in a...

We consider the effects of an imperfectly competitive banking sector on the capital stock in a version of the two-period Diamond OLG model, focusing on how profits are returned. There are two broad alternatives: profits may be taxed and returned to households exogenously as fiscal transfers or...

[...]The branch prices we study are less limited. Increasingly,banks are entering new markets by buying one or morebranches from other banks (Benz 1998). The price of a givenbranch should depend on the branch’s expected profits, andexpected profits, in turn, depend on competition. All...