We investigate the impact of the 2005-2007 cross-border bank takeovers in Ukraine – a country with poor institutional quality – on the performance of the target banks. Because acquirers targeted mainly larger, less-capitalised banks, we control for selection bias by combining propensity...

Mobile financial services such as M-PESA in Kenya are said to promote inclusion. Yet only 7.6 per cent of the Kenyans in the 2013 Financial Inclusion Insights dataset have ever used an M-PESA account to save for a future purchase. This paper uses a novel, three-step probit analysis to identify...

This paper documents the recent performance of European electronic purses. It presents data on 16 such schemes, and compares their penetration and usage rates. These rates are shown to differ substantially. A number of schemes are doing increasingly well and in all probability are here to stay....

A small but burgeoning literature tries to assess whether Metcalfe's law provides a realistic yardstick for the value of specific types of networks. This paper uncovers a number of flaws in the extant tests. Specifically, I point out that a proper test of Metcalfe's law – or of any of the...

Briscoe et al. IEEE Spectrum, 43(7), 34–39 (2006) claim that Metcalfe's law is “wrong”. One of their arguments is that “if Metcalfe's Law were true, then two networks ought to interconnect regardless of their relative sizes”. This paper shows that this argument is flawed

Menzies (2004) uses a ‘cohorts approach' to model banknote printing costs. This paper proposes a ‘generational approach' that allows for more realistic assumptions concerning currency growth and note replacement. The paper shows that Menzies' claim that the case for polymer banknotes becomes...

A 2013 article in Electronic Commerce Research and Applications (CYR, 2013) claims to demonstrate that user perceptions of website design are not only driven by national culture but also by country-level economic and technological parameters. This comment shows that the study's hypotheses should...

Zhang et al. exploit data on Facebook and Tencent to validate Metcalfe's law, which states that the aggregate value of a communications network is proportional to the square of the number of users. This note points out that the value of a social network may not only be driven by its size, but...

We use logit analysis to exploit a self-collected dataset on the payment and delivery options offered by the vast majority of B2C websites in 5 Central Asian transition economies. Specifically, we conduct a supply-side test of the Transaction Context Model, which highlights the role of perceived...

This paper models the banknote printing costs of a central bank in a society that uses progressively less cash. In such a setting, the central bank runs the risk of overinvesting when it introduces a new technology – for example when it switches from paper to polymer notes. I show that simple...