In a payment card association such as Visa, each time a consumer pays by card, the bank of the merchant (acquirer) pays an interchange fee (IF) to the bank of the cardholder (issuer) to carry out the transaction. This paper studies the determinants of socially and privately optimal IFs in a card...

Payment card networks, such as Visa, require merchants' banks to pay substantial quot;interchangequot; fees to cardholders' banks, on a per transaction basis. This paper shows that a network's profit-maximizing fee induces an inefficient price structure, over-subsidizing card usage and...

Why did the shadow banking sectors in the US and the euro area expand in the decade before the financial crisis and what are the implications for systemic risk and macro-prudential policy? This paper examines these issues with a model of the financial sector where the size of the shadow banking...

We study the role of informed trading in a fragmented financial market under the absence of inter-market price priority. Due to frictions in traders' market access, liquidity providers on alternative trading platforms may be exposed to an increased adverse selection risk. As a consequence, the...

Does cutting red tape foster entrepreneurship in industries with the potential to expand? We address this question by combining the time needed to comply with government entry procedures in 45 countries with industry-level data on employment growth and growth in the number of establishments...

We evaluate the role of insider ownership in shaping banks' equity issuances in response to the global financial crisis. We construct a unique dataset on the ownership structure of U.S. banks and their equity issuances and discover that greater insider ownership leads to less equity issuances....

During 2005-2006, the Chinese government implemented a reform aimed at eliminating the so-called non-tradable shares (NTS), shares typically held by the State or by politically connected institutional investors that were issued at the early stage of financial market development. Our analysis,...

Does firm ownership change affect performance? On the basis of a mean-value analysis and a fixed effects panel analysis of over 1100 Chinese companies during the period of ownership reform (1997-2003), this paper examines the performance impact of firm ownership transformation in China. The data...

This paper develops a structural model of the costs and beliefs required to rationalize household direct stock ownership. In the model, households believe they can learn information about individual stock returns through costly research. The model provides a novel explanation for many empirical...

This paper uses survey data for 29,000 households from 29 transition economies to explore how the use of banking services is related to household characteristics, bank ownership structure and the development of the financial infrastructure. At the household level we find that the holding of a...