Despite recent innovations that might have reduced banks' reliance on brick-and-mortar branches for distributing retail financial services, the number of U.S. bank branches has continued to increase steadily over time. Further, an increasing percentage of these branches are held by banks with...

This paper investigates the determination of the merchant usage fee of a monopolistic unitary payment card network based on characteristics of the downstream market. Merchants engage in Bertrand price competition that allows for an observation of heterogeneous products. We find that the payment...

This is a companion paper to Van Hove (2007). The latter paper builds on 16 firm-level case studies to examine the drivers behind the internationalization efforts of e-purse developers. Specifically, the paper tries to find out whether the approach proposed by Sarkar et al. (1999) for the...

We study the effect of government encouraged or mandated interchange fee ceilings on consumer and merchant adoption and usage of payment cards in an economy where card acceptance is far from complete. We believe that we are the first to use bank-level data to study the impact of interchange fee...

A large literature has detailed the seminal roles played in the Civil Rights Movement by activists, new political organizations, churches, and philanthropies. But black-owned businesses also provided a behind-the-scenes foundation for the movement’s success. Many black-owned businesses...

In this paper we provide new evidence on the relationship between market concentration in the banking industry and firm dynamics. In Italy, in the case of a banking merger or acquisition, the antitrust authorities can require the sale of bank branches if the joint market share of the banks...

Market segmentation characterized by price heterogeneity appears as a failure of classical view of market equilibrium. We suppose that an existence of specific asset pricing determines the wealth level of lenders. In microfinance, we look at the linkages between the welfare of lenders and market...

We study private firms' strategic disclosure of financial statements in shaping bank lending decisions and structuring debt contracts in informationally opaque credit markets. Using a unique dataset of loan applications by small businesses to a large bank, we document that the availability of...

In this paper, we investigate whether bank competition increases risk taking for the case of the Tunisian banks. Our data set covers nine Tunisian banks observed during the period from1980 to 2009 and we conducted an econometric model based on panel data estimations. The econometric results...