Merchants who accept credit cards face payment processing fees. In most countries, the no-surcharge rule prohibits them from using surcharges to pass these fees on to customers. However, merchants are allowed to steer consumers toward less costly payment methods by offering discounts or using...

Using data from Canada and the United States, we quantify consumers' net pecuniary cost of using cash, credit cards, and debit cards for purchases across income cohorts. The net cost includes fees paid to financial institutions, rewards received from credit or debit card issuers, and the...

Dealer networks provide essential intermediation services in over-the-counter markets. We document the response of dealer networks to the arrival of new public information. We find that after public news releases, dealer networks become more complex and channel larger flows of securities between...

We study settlement fails for trades in the Government of Canada bond market. We find that settlement fails do not occur independently. Using a novel and comprehensive dataset, we examine three drivers of fails. First, we find that fails are more likely following the release of surprise...

The pricing of payments has received increasing attention of regulators. In many cases, regulators are concerned that consumers do not face cost based prices. They argue that without cost based prices consumers will make inefficient choices. In this paper, it is argued that both, economics of...

This paper studies the welfare effects of different credit arrangements and how these effects depend on the trading mechanism and inflation. In a competitive market, a deviation from the Friedman rule is always sub-optimal. Moreover, credit arrangements can be welfare-reducing, because increased...

We analyse a card payment system to assess the economic impact of the interchange fee. This fee is paid by the bank of the merchant, the acquirer, to the bank of the consumer, the issuer. We build up a mode in order to explore whether the interchange fee can enhance the participation to the...