I calibrate switching cost for the Finnish retail deposit market by using the approach developed by Oz Shy (2002). It turns out that switching costs faced by deposit customers of the main banks are high, ranging from 200 euros to nearly 1,400 euros. Over the past 20 years, switching costs have...

Consider a competitive bank whose illiquid asset portfolio is funded by short-term debt that has to be refinanced before the asset matures. We show that in this setting maximal transparency is not socially optimal, and that the existence of social externalities of bank failures further lowers...

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...

We build a structural model of application and selection into a treatment program to study the effects of R&D subsidies. The investments of the participant and the public agency running the program affect the treatment outcome. Using project level data we find that larger firms have higher...

It is commonly thought that an open economy can accommodate output shocks through either exchange rate or real sector adjustments. We formalise this notion by incorporating labour market rigidities into an "escape clause" model of currency crises. We show that the absence of structural reform...

The banking system is known to be vulnerable to self-fulfilling crises that are caused by depositors' co-ordination failure. We show that transparency regulation may prevent certain types of systemic crisis by eliminating the possibility of coordination failure

We study a financial market adverse selection model where all agents are endowed with initial wealth and choose to invest as entrepreneurs or financiers, or not to invest. We show that often a lack of outside finance leads to the emergence of financial markets where availability of outside...

We study the effects of investor protection on the availability of external finance, entrepreneurship, and creation of new firms in an equilibrium search model of private capital markets. In addition to search frictions, we examine contract frictions, specifically interim and ex post moral...

Transparency regulation aims at reducing financial fragility by strengthening market discipline. There are however two elementary properties of banking that may render such regulation inefficient at best and detrimental at worst. First, an extensive financial safety net may eliminate the...