Many protocols have been proposed in the last year which address the problem of securely transferring money over a public network. Most of these schemes have similar goals: to enable transactions with properties similar to those achievable today using credit cards, to provide consumers and vendors with guarantees similar to those afforded by credit cards, or to translate existing payment mechan...

or two decades, economic and legal academics have speculated about the impact of the fees that merchants pay for credit card acceptance. Since all customers pay the same price, the theory goes, everyone pays for the benefits that go only to credit card users. A recent Federal Reserve Bank of Boston (FRBB) policy paper written by economists Scott Schuh, Oz Shy, and Joanna Stavins entitled Who Ga...

We show that family background matters significantly for children’s accumulation of wealth and investor behavior as adults, even when removing the genetic connection between children parents raising them. The analysis is made possible by linking Korean-born who were adopted at infancy Norwegian to a population panel data set with detailed information on socioeconomic characteristics. mechanism ...

Why have general-purpose stored-value cards been unsuccessful in penetrating the U.S. market? Three necessary conditions for a payment instrument to be successful are discussed: consumers and merchants need to be convinced of its advantages over existing payment alternatives for at least some types of transactions; payment providers must convince consumers and merchants simultaneously of its be...

Public authorities have recently intervened in the U.S. payment card industry to address controversy over the growing fees charged to merchants for processing debit card transactions. The interventions, by Congress and by the Department of Justice, aimed to give merchants and consumers some relief from the high fees and to promote competition within the payment card industry. The new regulation...

Two African states, Tanzania and Zambia, are seeking to change the ban on trade in ivory at the meeting next month of the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) in Qatar. But the countries face a battle, because other states, such as Kenya and Mali, are strongly opposed to any change and have been lobbying the EU in Brussels this month to support a block to any chan...

the purpose of this study was critical understanding of economic consequences of emergence and development of border market from the view point of perception, interpretation and experience of the people. in fact, cross-border market in kurdish regions has developed after the changes happened in iraq in last decades. hence, the study of the consequences of emergence and development of these type...

This paper introduces an artificial payment card market in which we model the interactions between consumers, merchants and competing card issuers with the aim of determining the optimal pricing structure for card issuers. We allow card issuers to charge consumers and merchants with fixed fees, provide net benefits from card usage and engage in marketing activities. The demand by consumers and ...

Over the last 10 years, availability of mobile phones has increased dramatically, especially in the developing markets. At the same time, majority of the population living in developing countries are still lacking the access to official financial services. This gap has enabled an opportunity to mobile network operators and financial service providers to introduce mobile money transfer services ...

This article takes a comparative approach, looking to two small cities in the Ottoman East – Mardin and Bitlis group of mansions constructed by new Armenian bourgeoisie late nineteenth early twentieth centuries. were similar owing important position that merchants held prosperous local markets booming period following Tanzimat reforms. Members this committed their locality showed playing an act...