There appears to be universal agreement that antitrust policy should "protect competition, not competitors" and that consumer welfare is the fundamental standard for evaluating competitive effects. There is considerable debate, however, about how to implement those principles in practice when...

A number of jurisdictions are considering imposing price caps on the interchange fees that card issuers receive from merchant acquirers when cardholders pay with their cards. Several have already done so. This paper examines the net impact of these price caps on consumers. The economics of...

This note is based on remarks I gave at a conference held at the New York Federal Reserve Bank on January 6, 2010 concerning proposals to reform consumer financial products protection in the United States. It observes that the U.S. Department of the Treasury's proposal for a radical increase in...

The U.S. Department of the Treasury has submitted the Consumer Financial Protection Agency Act of 2009 to Congress for the purpose of overhauling consumer financial regulation. This study has examined the likely effect of the Act on the availability of credit to American consumers. To do so we...

This paper focuses on the value of consumer payments made with cash, which we refer to as “total cash spending”, and the share of total spending that is made with cash, which we refer to as the “cash-spending share”. We provide estimates of these measures of cash use for 2000-2011 and...

The cost to merchants of taking payment on debit cards declined by more than $7 billion annually as a result of the Durbin Amendment to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, while the effective cost to issuers of providing debit card services to consumers...

This paper examines the impact of the reductions in interchange fees proposed by the the Federal Reserve Board on consumers and small businesses. We find that consumers and small business would face higher retail banking fees and lose valuable services as banks rationally seek to make up as much...

U.S. v. Microsoft and the related state suit filed in 1998 appear finally to have concluded. In a unanimous en banc decision issued in late June 2004, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected challenges to the remedies approved by the District Court in November 2002. The wave of follow-on...