The European Commission and the European Central Bank seek to lower payment costs within the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA). Payment scale and scope economies estimated using previously unavailable individual bank data for the Netherlands over 1997-2005 show that costs can be markedly reduced...

Measuring banking competition using the HHI, Lerner index, or H-statistic can give conflicting results. Borrowing from frontier analysis, the authors provide an alternative approach and apply it to Spain over 1992-2005. Controlling for differences in asset composition, productivity, scale...

The substitution of electronic payments for paper-based non-cash transactions and the share of cash in the value of consumption are investigated for Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand over 1995-2003. Five and ten-year logistic curve projections for electronic and cash...

Target is a real time gross settlement (RTGS) large value payment network operated by European central banks that eliminates systemic risk. Euro1 is a privately operated delayed net settlement (DNS) network that reduces substantially systemic risk but does not eliminate it. This difference makes...

Studies of banking competition and competitive behaviour both within and across countries typically utilise only one of the few measures that are available. In trying to assess the relative competitive position of banking markets in 14 European countries, we find that the existing indicators of...

We model bank oligopoly behaviour using price and non-price competition as strategic variables in an expanded conjectural variations framework. Rivals can respond to changes in both loan and deposit market prices as well as (non-price) branch market shares. The model is illustrated using data...

There are numerous ways to indicate the degree of banking competition across countries. Antitrust authorities rely on the structure-conduct-performance paradigm while academics prefer price mark-ups (Lerner index) or correlations of input costs with output prices (H-statistic). These measures...

Debit cards in Europe replace many medium value cash payments while stored value cards were designed to replace small value cash transac-tions. Unit cost considerations dictated a two-card (or single card) dual technology approach to cash replacement since unit costs were too high to use debit...

This paper discusses various theoretic concepts which play a role in assessing the public benefits of Target, the large value RTGS payment network operated by the Eurosystem. These concepts touch upon natural monopoly, network externalities, competition and contestability, as well as economies...