We study price pressures, i.e., deviations from the efficient price due to risk-averse intermediaries supplying liquidity to asynchronously arriving investors. Empirically, New York Stock Exchange intermediary data reveals economically large price pressures, 0.49% on average with a half life of...

In this study, a multi-party payment card network model is constructed to explore the determination of merchant and interchange fees, thereby extending Langlet's (2009) observation of unitary payment systems. The focus of this analysis was on the impact of consumer price elasticity, the relative...

We develop a parsimonious price formation model to study information aggregation and information acquisition in the presence of trading delays. If delays apply uniformly to uninformed and informed traders, the level of delays does not affect information aggregation. Traders' information...

The provision of retail payment services is complex with many participants engaging in a series of interrelated bilateral transactions and subject to large economies of scale and scope along with strong adoption, usage and network externalities. This makes sound public policy difficult. We focus...

This thesis strives to offer new insights in two main areas. First, in the well-researched domain of payment cards chapters 2 and 3 investigate an aspect that has hitherto been scantly examined, namely, the fact that merchant usage fees differ substantially among merchant sectors. Additionally,...

We study how bankers can elicit lower capital requirements via lobbying: Bankers pledge to politicians a lobbying rate as a fraction of bank revenues, thus relating politicians' welfare to the size of banks. This induces politicians to lower capital requirements, which causes high leverage...

The paper studies pricing of insurance products focusing on the pricing of annuities under uncertainty. This pricing problem is crucial for financial decision making and was studied intensively; however, many open questions still remain.In particular, there is a so-called "annuity puzzle"...

Demand and supply uncertainty lead to market models setting prices to levels of acceptable risk for excess supplies and net revenues. The result is a two price equilibrium. Equilibrium solutions applied to financial market data infer demand and supply elasticities and log normal volatilities....

We investigate how firms' market power affects the price level. In our small macro-model we show, that firms - in addition to hypothesised structural mark-up pricing power - may take advantage of favourable business cycle fluctuations. The paper provides empirical evidence for both these...