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...

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...

C ARBo V ALVERDE S., H UMPHREY D. B. and R ODRiGUEZ F ERNaNDEZ F. (2003) Deregulation, bank competition and regional growth, Reg. Studies 37 , 227-237. Cross-country studies suggest that countries with greater financial sector competition have higher rates of economic growth. However, it is...

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...

Banks were substantially deregulated during the 1980s. This altered the cost-minimizing mix between deposit interest payments and operating expenses (capital and labor for branch convenience and “free” deposit services). Measured bank output was relatively unaffected by these changes. The...