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Jean-Charles Rochet
- 30 December 2009
- WORKING PAPER SERIES - No. 1138Details
- Abstract
- We build a model of credit card pricing that explicitly takes into account credit functionality. We show that a monopoly card network always selects an interchange fee that exceeds the level that maximizes consumer surplus. If regulators only care about consumer surplus, a conservative regulatory approach is to cap interchange fees based on retailers
- JEL Code
- E42 : Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics→Money and Interest Rates→Monetary Systems, Standards, Regimes, Government and the Monetary System, Payment Systems
- Network
- Retail payments: integration & innovation
- 26 July 2005
- WORKING PAPER SERIES - No. 507Details
- Abstract
- We study optimal pricing rules for a public large-value payment system (LVPS) that produces a public good (like prevention of systemic risk) but faces competition by a private LVPS for the private provision of large value payments. We show that the marginal cost of the public LVPS has to be corrected by a "public good factor"that can be interpreted alternatively as the decrease in the cost of providing the public good when the private activity of the public system increases, or as the subsidy needed for private banks to internalize the cost of systemic risk. In either interpretation, the public good factor is easy to measure: it corresponds to the subsidy needed for private banks to allocate their payments in the way that is desired by banking authorities.
- JEL Code
- G28 : Financial Economics→Financial Institutions and Services→Government Policy and Regulation
H41 : Public Economics→Publicly Provided Goods→Public Goods
- 23 December 2003
- WORKING PAPER SERIES - No. 298Details
- Abstract
- The classical Bagehot's conception of a Lender of Last Resort (LOLR) that lends to illiquid banks has been criticized on two grounds: on the one hand, the distinction between insolvency and illiquidity is not clear cut; on the other a fully collateralized repo market allows Central Banks to provide the adequate aggregated amount of liquidity and leave the responsibility of lending uncollateralized to the banks. The object of this paper is to analyze rigorously these issues by providing a framework where liquidity shocks cannot be distinguished from solvency ones and ask whether there is a need for a LOLR and how should it operate. Determining the optimal LOLR policy requires a careful modeling of the structure of the interbank market and of the closure policy. In our set up, the results depend upon the existence of moral hazard. If the main source of moral hazard is the banks' lack of incentives to screen loans, then the LOLR may have to intervene to improve the efficiency of an unsecured interbank market; if instead, the main source of moral hazard is loans monitoring, then the interbank market should be secured and the LOLR should never intervene.
- JEL Code
- E58 : Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics→Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit→Central Banks and Their Policies
G28 : Financial Economics→Financial Institutions and Services→Government Policy and Regulation
- 1 October 2002
- WORKING PAPER SERIES - No. 184Details
- Abstract
- This paper studies the efficient pricing of large-value payment systems in the presence of unobservable heterogeneity about banks' future payment volumes. It is shown that the optimal pricing scheme for a public monopoly system involves quantity discounts in the form of a decreasing marginal fee. This is also true when the public system competes with a provate system characterized by a lower marginal cost. However in this case, optimal marginal fees in the public system are lower than its marginal cost, and fixed fees have to be levied. We also study the case of competition between several public systems. The structure of the optimal tariff depends on the willigness of Central Banks to allow by-pass.
- JEL Code
- G28 : Financial Economics→Financial Institutions and Services→Government Policy and Regulation
E58 : Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics→Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit→Central Banks and Their Policies
D42 : Microeconomics→Market Structure and Pricing→Monopoly
D43 : Microeconomics→Market Structure and Pricing→Oligopoly and Other Forms of Market Imperfection