Volume 6, Issue 4

This paper evaluates the impact of the tightening in price cap by OFWAT and of other operational factors on the efficiency of water and sewerage companies in England and Wales using a mixture of data envelopment analysis and stochastic frontier analysis. Previous empirical results suggest that the regulatory system introduced at privatization was lax. The 1999 price review signaled a tightening in regulation which is shown to have led to a significant reduction in technical inefficiency. The new economic environment set by price-cap regulation acted to bring inputs closer to their cost-minimizing levels from both a technical and allocative perspective.

The goal of SEPA (Single Euro Payments Area) is to facilitate the emergence of a competitive, intra-European market by making cross-border payments as easy as domestic transactions. With cross-border inter-operability for electronic payments, card transactions will increasingly replace cash and checks for all types of payments. Using different methods, we estimate card and other payment network scale economies for Europe. These indicate substantial cost efficiency gains if processing is consolidated across borders rather than "piggy-backed" onto existing national operations. Cost reductions likely to induce greater replacement of small value cash transactions are also illustrated.

This paper aims to empirically establish the determinants of merchant participation in credit card payment schemes. It is found that a merchant's personal background, type of business and total value of sales are significant in determining a merchant's acceptance of cards in payment transactions. Further, it is found that customers' usage of credit cards and other merchants’ acceptance of credit cards in payments have a significant influence on a merchant's decision. Findings also indicate that non-pecuniary strategic factors are stronger drivers and barriers to a merchant's participation in credit cards payments services compared to monetary related factors.

This article revisits the research in "The Move Toward a Cashless Society: A Closer Look at Payment Instrument Economics" in order to clarify assumptions underlying the theoretical model and how they impact the included cost and benefit categories; evaluate the estimates' plausibility by comparing the model's results to observed behaviour; and extend the sensitivity analysis.

We address Allan Shampine's critiques of our study on the costs and benefits of payment instruments, and review the current state of the literature. We argue that a consensus seems to be emerging in which: (a) different payment instruments appear to be socially efficient at different transaction sizes; (b) cash appears to be efficient for small payments; and (c) debit cards appear to overtake cash as the socially optimal instrument as the transaction size increases. Except for the fact that in our study credit appears to overtake debit at large transaction sizes, our 2006 findings are consistent with the consensus.

We provide a theoretical result on the effect of piracy on the sales of legal product using the same framework as Gil (2006). We obtain that when the illegal sector is perfectly competitive and the marginal cost of the legal firm and the quantity tax are small enough, piracy does not lead to lower sales of the legal product.

In a comment to my paper "The Economics of IPR Protection Policies," Martínez-Sánchez (2007) shows that in my model under certain conditions the presence of piracy increases the quantity produced by the legal monopolist firm. In this note, I show how the algebra used in Martínez-Sánchez (2007) may be misleading and clarify under what assumptions such a finding would emerge. Finally, I discuss the validity of the assumptions in my model that would yield such counterintuitive finding.