We consider a finite economy with men and women. The agents have status concerns such that when a particular agent has k agents of the same type below him/her in the income distribution, he/she gets utility kA, where A0, from status. Acquiring income is costly and once the income distribution is...

We build a simple model to study service fee competition between an incumbent and an independent ATM deployer, and its optimal regulation. We use the model to analyze an actual regulation of such a market by competition authorities in Finland. We find that socially optimal first-best fees would...

Declining ATM numbers pose a challenge for competition policy and financial regulatory authorities. In this report we review the Finnish experience of regulating the competition in the ATM industry. To analyze the Finnish developments we extend the model of Kopsakangas-Savolainen and Takalo...

We study a competitive banking sector in which banks choose the level of risk of their asset portfolios and, upon the public disclosure of stress test results, raise funding by promising investors a repayment. We show that competition forces banks to choose risky assets so as to promise...

​In this article we first document the evidence showing how an efficient retail payment infrastructure enhances economic performance. We then review the policy tools available to promote efficient retail payments in Europe. We argue that while SEPA is an important policy initiative that...