Traditional economic analysis of markets with asymmetric information assumes that uninformed agents account for the incentives of informed agents to distort information. We analyze whether investors in the stock market internalize such incentives. Stock recommendations of security analysts are...

We study the influence of middle managers (“supervisors”) on financial misconduct at financial advisory firms. Individual supervisor fixed effects explain twice as much variation in branch misconduct as firm fixed effects. Studying supervisors at different branches within the same firm-year,...

We examine whether market-wide investor sentiment influences the stock price response to firm-specific news. We use the recently developed measure of investor sentiment by Baker and Wurgler (2006, 2007) and focus on the stock price response to earnings announcements. Our results indicate that...

This paper summarizes lessons from interviews of 22 consumers who use prepaid cards (PPCs), an emerging product in the market space between institution-based transaction accounts and non-account services like check-cashing and money orders. A majority of interviewees used PPCs as their primary...

Indonesia has a rich historical tradition of mutual cooperation at the community level. This study argues that rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs) constitute successful experiences of collective action within the informal financial sector. Therefore, using data from Indonesia...

At the request of the Minister for Climate and Energy, Paul Magnette, who is also responsible for Consumer Affairs, the NBB's Microeconomic Analysis Service conducted an investigation into the link between payment arrears for mobile telephony and arrears on loan repayments. In this inquiry,...

Permanent disequilibrium in mainstream credit markets have pushed the unbanked and underbanked households to frequent high cost payday loans for their liquidity needs. Associated with the latter are welfare-reducing issues of predation and debt-entrapment. In response to this market failure, we...

The paper investigates the reasons why person-to-person electronic funds transfers are still not very common in the United States compared with practices in many other countries. The paper also describes recent enhancements to online and mobile banking that provide account holders with low-cost...

Merchant fees and reward programs generate an implicit monetary transfer to credit card users from non-card (or cash) users because merchants generally do not set differential prices for card users to recoup the costs of fees and rewards. On average, each cash-using household pays $149 to...

In 2010, the Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a lawsuit against the credit card networks American Express, MasterCard, and Visa for alleged antitrust violations. We evaluate the extent to which the recently proposed settlement between the DOJ and Visa and MasterCard (henceforth, Proposed...