Estimacion de Economias de Escala en el Mercado de Tarjetas de Pago

During the last years, the growth of transactions made through credit and debit cards has presented quite signif- icant increases both in number and in amounts. This paper studies the existence of economies of scale in the pro- cessing of such transactions, a situation that would exist if it were compatible with the existence of a single firm destined to the processing of said operations. The existence of a single firm for processing is not in itself a problem per se, which does generate problems for the competition is the structure of said firm, because for the period of time analyzed, its shareholder composition was composed of The main banks that issue these cards, but also have given them the function of being the acquirer of the merchants for these payment methods, which generates a vertically inte- grated structure, which creates competition problems in the market. After estimating the model indirectly from a cost function, this work determines the existence of economies of scale in the industry.