We model side payments in a competitive credit-card market. If competitive retailers charge a single (higher) price to cover the cost of accepting cards, banks must subsidize convenience users to prevent them from defecting to merchants who do not accept cards. The side payments will be financed...

This paper proposes a framework for describing why consumers use electronic banking products such as electronic bill payment, credit cards, debit cards, stored value, and e-cash. The paper surveys the literature; reports on the results of several studies, and develops a framework for evaluating...

Significant debate has occurred over the last several decades regarding whether there is adequate competition and innovation in the non-recurring consumer payments segment of the banking industry. The Department of Justice and some retailers have sued Visa and MasterCard for limiting competition...

Over the last decade, consumers have tripled their use of credit cards as more merchants have increased their acceptance of them. This increase suggests that incentives in today's marketplace favor greater credit card use by consumers and acceptance by merchants. In this paper, we study the set...

A number of recent initiatives have encouraged use of debit cards and ACH debits/credits for Internet sales transactions. This paper outlines the different statutory and regulatory protections available to consumers and financial institution based upon the method by which payment is made.

This article describes financial account aggregation and explores potential financial risks to the consumer and account holding financial institutions from aggregation. The current state of the law and contractual relationships relevant to such risks are analyzed. These risks include,...

This paper explores a new approach to identifying government spending shocks which avoids many of the shortcomings of existing approaches. The new approach is to identify government spending shocks with statistical innovations to the accumulated excess returns of large US military contractors....

Covered bonds and mortgage-backed securities both allow mortgages to be financed with duration-matched bonds. Given the problems in the MBS market during the financial crisis, some suggest that covered bonds might be a substitute for MBS. We examine the use of covered bonds and MBS in the U.S....

Dynamic stochastic equilibrium models of the macro economy are designed to match the macro time series including impulse response functions. Since these models aim to be structural, they also have implications for asset pricing. To assess these implications, we explore asset pricing counterparts...

This paper uses highly detailed, quarterly data for five major industrialized economies to estimate the impact of macroeconomic fluctuations on import protection policies over 1988:Q1–2010:Q4. First, estimates on a pre-Great Recession sample of data provide evidence of two key relationships....