This thesis strives to offer new insights in two main areas. First, in the well-researched domain of payment cards chapters 2 and 3 investigate an aspect that has hitherto been scantly examined, namely, the fact that merchant usage fees differ substantially among merchant sectors. Additionally,...

Das Vertrauen der Verbraucher in die Finanzdienstleistungsbranche hat in den letzten Jahren stark abgenommen und befindet sich auf einem Tiefpunkt. Schuld an dieser Situation sind oftmals die Strukturen der verkaufsorientierten Finanzberatung. Ein häufig genanntes Problem in diesem Zusammenhang...

The rise of a crisis-prone banking sector and its political power has received significant attention following the most recent financial crisis. The crisis sparked a growing interest in understanding how and why we have created a world of large, unstable banks. Excessive banking activity arose...

This thesis was written by Jakob Eberl while having been a research assistant at the Center for Economic Studies (CES) at the University of Munich. It was completed in December 2015 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich in May 2016. The...