BACKGROUND Many women giving birth in Australian hospitals can choose to donate their child's umbilical cord blood to a public cord blood bank or pay to store it privately. We conducted a survey to determine the proportion and characteristics of pregnant women who are aware of umbilical cord blood (UCB) banking and who have considered and decided about this option. The survey also sought to asc...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the cost-effectiveness of private umbilical cord blood banking. METHODS A decision-analytic model was designed comparing private umbilical cord blood banking with no umbilical cord blood banking. Baseline assumptions included a cost of $3,620 for umbilical cord blood banking and storage for 20 years, a 0.04% chance of requiring an autologous stem cell transplant, a 0....

The purpose of the study is to investigate determinants of Internet banking adoption based on an individual’s benefits and costs of adopting Internet banking. Using data from the 2001 Survey of Consumer Finances, this paper estimates an adoption model for Internet banking. Our findings show that consumers’ ability, attitude and opportunity cost of time play a significant role on the decision of...

Universalbanks have long played a leading role in Germany, Switzerland, and other Continental European countries. The principal financial institutions in these countries typically are universal banks offering the entire array of banldng services. Continental European banks are engaged in deposit taldng, real estate and other forms of lending, foreign exchange trading, as well as underwriting, s...

This research emphasizes attitudinal difference of Malaysian customers about Islamic banking services. The banking service providers can gain excellent benefit from Islamic banking practices upon identification of these differences. A structured questionnaire was constructed to collect the necessary data to answer the research questions as being framed on related affective factors of attitudina...

Design of a retail banking distribution strategy is an important issue in that industry. This paper shows the effect of new electronic distribution technologies such as PC banking on the choice of a bank’s distribution strategy. We present a competitive model of distribution strategy choice, including heterogeneous consumers and banks, that allows a rich variety of customer preference and techn...

The Nigerian banking system had operated perfectly on the manual banking system where the banking activity is done in a single banking hall with much manual recording system and many paper works. However, there was the issue of poor transparency of the whole process, poor dissemination of financial information and unreliable financial information by the banks. These call for a change and hence ...

The rapid growth of mobile technologies and devices makes it possible for the customers of banking services to conduct banking at any place and at any time. Today, most of the banks in the world provide mobile access to its customers for banking as mobile banking systems improve their efficiency and reduce transaction costs. Banks invested heavily in the mobile banking system hoping that its cu...

Aristotle, who, having predated Adam Smith by 2000 years, deserves to be recognized as the world's first economist (Solomon, 1995), distinguished between two different senses of what we call economics: oikonomikos, or household trading, which he approved of and considered essential to the working of any even slightly complex society, and chrematisike, or trade for profit, which he considered se...

Financial crises are linked to large output declines, but the potential links between different types of crises remains unclear. To enhance understanding we study the interdependencies between domestic banking crises, on one hand, and external financial crises, including currency and sudden stop crises, on the other in a quarterly global panel. We further ask how the different crises relate to ...