We use an 'unexplained demand for cash' approach to measure the size of the shadow economy in Sweden. The size of the shadow economy is found to have increased from 3.8 to 6.5 per cent of GDP from 1990 to 2004. This result is also supported by our finding of an increased residual between...

Despite the central role of payments in theoretical and policy oriented economics, there is surprisingly little known about the costs of different payment instruments. We estimate social and private costs of cash, debit and credit card payments in Sweden in 2002. The combined social cost of...

We estimate private costs in the Swedish banking sector for the production of payment services and investigate to what extent the price structure reflects the estimated cost structure. We find that (i) banks tend to use two-part tariffs but (ii) variable costs are poorly reflected in transaction...