We assess the competitiveness of the $400 billion dollar U.S. bank consumer loan market by comparing results from different competition measures-HHI, Lerner Index, H-Statistic along with three others, two of which are related to frontier analysis. These measures are typically weakly related to...

Studies of banking competition and competitive behavior 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, existing indicators of competition are...

Pricing should speed up the substitution of low cost electronic payments for expensive paper-based transactions and cash. But by how much? Norway has explicitly priced individual payment transactions and rapidly shifted to electronic payments while the Netherlands has experienced the same shift...

Electronic payments are considerably cheaper than their paper-based alternatives. Similarly, ATMs are a more cost-efficient way to deliver certain depositor services than are branch offices. As the share of electronic payments in 12 European countries rose from 0.43 in 1987 to 0.79 in 1999 and...

The goal of SEPA (Single Euro Payments Area) is to facilitate the emergence of a competitive, intra-European market by making cross-border payments as easy as domestic transactions. With cross-border inter-operability for electronic payments, card transactions will increasingly replace cash and...

This paper studies the risk of fire sales in the tri-party repo market, a large and important market where securities dealers find short-term funding for a substantial portion of their own and their clients' assets. We distinguish between fire sales of assets by a dealer who, facing a run that...

Monetary policy measures taken by the Federal Reserve as a response to the 2007-09 financial crisis and subsequent economic conditions led to a large increase in the level of outstanding reserves. The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) has a range of tools to control short-term market rates in...

In a floor system of monetary policy implementation, the central bank remunerates bank reserves at or near the market rate of interest. Some observers have expressed concern that operating such a system will have adverse fiscal consequences for the public sector and may even require the...

In this paper, we consider the costs and benefits of transactions privacy. In the environment we consider, privacy is the concealment of potentially useful information, but concealment also potentially bestows benefits. In some versions of the environment, the standard Coasian logic applies:...