Search Results
Working Paper
Scope and scale economies in Federal Reserve payment processing
In the past decade, the U.S. economy has witnessed a tremendous surge in the usage of electronic payment processing services and an increased importance of the firms that provide these services. The payments industry has also undergone changes in cost structure with the introduction of new technology. Unfortunately, data on the private provision of payment processing services are not available. However, the Federal Reserve provides similar services and collects data on its own provision of payments processing, offering an opportunity to gain insights into the cost structure of payments ...
Conference Paper
Preface
Working Paper
On the welfare cost of inflation
Estimates are provided for the social cost of inflation in the U.S. economy. The estimated cost, expressed as a fraction of income, is proportional to the square root of the nominal interest rate. This approximation assigns much higher costs to low rates of inflation than does the familiar welfare triangle formula. ; These estimates are rationalized using Sidrauski's model, in which real balances yield utility, and also using the McCallum-Goodfriend model, in which real balances and time are combined via a transactions technology to support a given spending flow. The latter formulation is ...
Working Paper
Where's The Bank? Banking Access in the Era of Branch Consolidation
This study examines changes in household and employment access to bank branches in the United States from 2014 to 2024, calculating distances with highly granular census block-level data. We develop a continuous measure of bank branch access that accounts for population and employment density, implicitly accounting for varying travel times within different urban and rural areas. Our findings indicate that despite a 19-percent decline in bank branches over the decade, average distances to the nearest branch increased only modestly—by 0.02 to 0.28 miles depending on area density. We find some ...
Working Paper
Bank Fees, Aftermarkets, and Consumer Behavior
Fees for banking services have been a policy concern for over 20 years and the subject of several government agencies studies, which focused on the magnitude, incidence, or disclosure of such fees. Using a sample of single market banks, I study the relationship between market-level consumer characteristics and bank fee revenue, fees, and bank return on assets (ROA) to infer consumer and firm behavior. Of particular interest, I use county-level IRS tax records as a measure of the consumer income distribution, but my analysis also includes measures of age and education distributions. I find ...
Working Paper
The effects of past entry, market consolidation, and expansion by incumbents on the probability of entry
The threat of entry is an important factor in the evaluation of the potential competitive effects of proposed mergers and acquisitions. In the evaluation of proposed bank mergers, a high probability of entry, or strong potential competition, is often found to mitigate the potential anticompetitive effect of a proposed horizontal merger. Because the probability of entry is not directly observed for each local market, variables such as per capita income, population growth and past entry are typically used to predict the probability of future entry. This study extends previous research on the ...
Working Paper
Consolidation and merger activity in the United States banking industry from 2000 through 2010
This study investigates trends in consolidation and merger activity in the United States banking industry from 2000 through 2010. Over this period, the U.S. banking industry has consistently experienced over 150 mergers annually, with the largest banking organizations holding an increasing share of banking assets. While the industry has undergone considerable consolidation at the national level, local banking markets have not experienced significant increases in concentration. The dynamics of consolidation raise concerns about competition, output, efficiency, and financial stability. This ...
Working Paper
Scale economies, scope economies, and technical change in Federal Reserve payment processing
In the past decade, the U.S. economy has witnessed a tremendous surge in the usage of electronic payment processing services and an increased importance of the firms that provide these services. The payments industry has also undergone changes in cost structure with the introduction of new technology. Unfortunately, data on the private provision of payment processing services are not available. However, the Federal Reserve provides similar services and collects data on its own provision of payments processing, offering an opportunity to gain insights into the cost structure of payments ...
Working Paper
Market power in outputs and inputs: an empirical application to banking
This paper provides evidence on the empirical separability of input and output market imperfections. We specify a model of banking competition and simultaneously estimate bank conduct in output (loan) and input (deposit) markets. Our results suggest that firms display some degree of non-competitive behavior in both the loan and the deposit markets. Moreover, we find that the input side and the output side are empirically separable, that is, the measurement of market power on one side of the market is not affected by assuming that the other side of the market is perfectly competitive. Our ...
Working Paper
The effects of local banking market structure on the banking-lending channel of monetary policy
We study the relationship between banking competition and the transmission of monetary policy through the bank lending channel. Using business small loan origination data provided from the Community Reinvestment Act from 1996-2002 in our analysis, we are able to reaffirm the existence of the bank lending channel of monetary transmission. Moreover, we find that the impact of monetary policy on loan originations is weaker in more concentrated markets.