What happens when you take a key price in an industry and cut it in half? For normal markets economists would expect that this would have a dramatic effect on quantity. That, however, was not the experience in Australia when the Reserve Bank of Australian (RBA) used new powers in 2003 to move Visa and MasterCard interchange fees from around 0.95 percent of the value of a transaction to just 0.5 percent. The evidence demonstrates that this change was virtually undetectable in any real variable to do with that industry.

Read the full piece here.

What happens when you take a key price in an industry and cut it in half? For normal markets economists would expect that this would have a dramatic effect on quantity. That, however, was not the experience in Australia when the Reserve Bank of Australian (RBA) used new powers in 2003 to move Visa and MasterCard interchange fees from around 0.95 percent of the value of a transaction to just 0.5 percent. The evidence demonstrates that this change was virtually undetectable in any real variable to do with that industry.

Read the full piece here.

Next summer, the World Cup, the world’s most watched sporting event, marks its quadrennial return.  Although thirty-two teams will compete in South Africa, the list of favorites begins with the two teams that have won half of the previous eighteen tournaments and three of the last four—Brazil and Italy.  Brazil plays an open and flowing brand of soccer.  Italy sits back and pounces when its opponents stumble.  Although Brazil and Italy follow different philosophies, they have achieved similar success because both have adopted strategies to overcome the adversity that inevitably arises in a major tournament.  Even a weak opponent can manage to score a single goal when a referee blows a call.  But good teams find a way to overcome.

Read the full piece here.

Interchange fees on payment cards are obviously a hot topic in the United States, but also in Europe and in many other countries around the world.  The report on interchange fees released last month by the US Government Accounting Office (GAO) notes that more than 30 countries have intervened or are considering intervening in the payment card industry.

Read the full piece here.

What is most surprising about the GAO report is how little the analytical discussion of this subject has advanced in the last decade.  We all know that interchange rates might contribute to higher retail prices: customers that use cheaper payment products can be said to “subsidize” customers that use credit cards.  Starting with the Australian initiative, regulators for a decade have sought to understand the costs of credit-card processing and to push interchange fees down to the “competitive” level of the “costs” of providing the service.  Conversely, economists writing about two-sided networks have shown that the focus on costs reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the two-sided network, in which the interchange fee is an allocation of burden between merchants and cardholders, not a charge for services rendered to one side or the other.

Read the full piece here.

From Larry Ribstein:

A few years later, Henry Butler and I wrote a book decrying SOX, and discussing the evidence that was accumulating against it, as well as the SOX suit. Here’s an excerpt from the book abstract…

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Professor Adam Levitin is not impressed by our prediction of the effect on consumer credit of the CFPA.  Readers might recall that, using estimates from the literature on the effect of regulatory shocks on interest rates and of the long-term debt elasticity, we offered a (in our words) “rough calculation” of the “lower bound” of the effect of the CFPA Act on consumer credit at 2.1%.  Professor Levitin says that we just “make up the numbers” and that they do not pass the “straight-faced test.”  In his paper (and second blog post) Professor Levitin offers more of the same formula: a combination of assertions unsupported by evidence, ad hominem attacks, and insistence to his prior assumption that the CFPA will reduce the cost of credit without imposing serious regulatory costs (again, without substantiation).  He writes that his real problem with our analysis is that “The key point here, however, is the impact of the legislation is speculative and certainly not susceptible to precise statistical predictions.”

Read the full piece here. 

Today’s Wall Street Journal includes a terrific article explaining why insider trading should be deregulated. Following up on last week’s high-profile insider trading charges, George Mason economist Don Boudreaux, whose Cafe Hayek posts are essential reading, succinctly sets forth the deregulatory position (which was first and most famously articulated by Geoff’s dad, Henry Manne).

Read the full piece here.

Back during the days when socialism was all the rage among the intelligentsia, F.A. Hayek predicted that Soviet-style central planning was destined to fail because the central planners lacked access to, and couldn’t process, all the information needed to allocate productive resources efficiently. Optimal resource allocation can occur, Hayek contended, only if resources are allocated according to the prices that emerge as millions of people buy and sell on the information to which they alone are privy. Hayek maintained that market prices dictate the highest and best use of resources and that such prices cannot be produced by a single mind (i.e., the Soviet-style central planner) but can emerge only as millions of folks reveal their needs and desires by trading amongst themselves.

Read the full piece here.