Cost savings from electronic payments and ATMs in Europe

Electronic payments are considerably cheaper than their paper-based alternatives. Similarly, ATMs are a more cost-efficient way to deliver certain depositor services than are branch offices. As the share of electronic payments in 12 European countries rose from 0.43 in 1987 to 0.79 in 1999 and ATMs expanded while the number of branch offices was constant, bank operating costs are estimated to be $32 billion lower than they otherwise might have been, saving 0.38% of the 12 nations' GDP. The authors' results are robust to the form of cost function estimated-composite, Fourier, or translog. ; Also issued as Payment Cards Center Discussion Paper No. 03-14Automated tellers ; Electronic funds transfers

Increasing goal congruence in project evaluation by introducing a strict market depreciation schedule

The economic accuracy of accrual-based managerial performance measures is most essential for value added investment decisions in decentralised firms. Contemporary EVA-literature often lends support to annuity-based depreciation schedules for accomplishing congruence between capital budgeting criteria, like NPV, and accounting measures, like ROI and RI. This is incongruent with the principal agent literature aiming at designing managerial incentive contracts. We introduce a strict market-based depreciation schedule which is shown to be superior to ordinary straight-line, annuity-based or IRR-based depreciation schedules. It gives the right managerial investment incentives also in the case of growth, inflation or technological development.Depreciation Managerial incentive Performance measurement Capital budgeting EVA

Capital structure choices

Corporate finance theory provides a number of competing hypotheses for explaining the capital structure choice of firms. The major ones are the 'trade-off' theory, which hypothesises an optimal combination of debt and equity capital, and the 'pecking-order' theory, which suggests a ranking order between different types of capital making a firm's capital structure an aggregated result of successive financial decisions. Previous studies find evidence both supporting and contradicting the two theories. We examine the role and importance of different firm characteristics as well as to what extent managers in Swedish firms make capital structure choices in accordance with the theories and are affected by concepts like optimal capital structure, financial hierarchy, windows of opportunity, signalling, asymmetric information and flexibility. Our conclusion is that capital structure choices are built on a balancing notion suggesting a revised trade-off theory or alternatively an extended pecking order theory also incorporating agency costs and signalling.corporate finance; optimal capital structure; trade-offs; pecking order; financial decisions; financial choices; debt; equity; financial hierarchy; window of opportunity; signalling; flexibility; asymmetric information; agency costs.