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Journal Article
Understanding risk management in emerging retail payments
New technologies used in payment methods can reduce risk, but they can also lead to new risks. Emerging retail payments are prone to operational and fraud risks, especially security breaches and potential use in illicit transactions. This article describes an economic framework for understanding risk control in retail payments. Risk control is a special type of good because it can protect one payment participant without diminishing the protection of other participants. As a result, the authors' economic framework emphasizes risk containment, primarily through the establishment and enforcement ...
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Payment intermediation and the origins of banking
The medieval banks of continental Europe facilitated trade by serving as payment intermediaries. Depositors commonly would pay one another by transferring bank balances with the aid of overdraft credit. We model this process in an environment of intermediate good exchange with incomplete contract enforcement. Our model suggests that the early banks were capable of accessing the ?netting credit? that exists by virtue of there being a high proportion of offsetting transactions in an economy. Individual traders are unable to net their individual positions because of difficulty in enforcing ...
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A general equilibrium analysis of check float
Households and businesses in the U.S. prefer to use check payment over less costly, electronic means of payment. Earlier studies have focused on check ?float,? i.e., the time lag between receipt and clearing, as a potential explanation for the continued popularity of checks. An underlying assumption of these studies is that check float operates as a pure transfer from payee to payor. ; We construct a simple general equilibrium model in which payments are made by check. In general equilibrium, check float need not act as a transfer. If float can be priced into market transactions, then it has ...
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Settlement risk under gross and net settlement
Previous comparative analyses of gross and net settlement have focused on the credit risk of the central counterparty in net settlement arrangements, and on the incentives for participants to alter the risk of the portfolio under net settlement. By modeling the trading economy that generates the demand for payment services, we are able to show some largely unexplored advantages of net settlement. We find that net settlement systems avoid certain gridlock situations, which may arise in gross settlement in the absence of delivery versus payment requirements. In addition, net settlement can ...
Journal Article
How little we know about deficit policy effects
We use a simple model to show why previous empirical studies of budget policy effects are flawed. Due to an identification problem, those studies' findings can be shown to be consistent with policies either mattering or not. We argue that this problem is difficult and not likely to be resolved soon.
Journal Article
Forecasting and modeling the U.S. economy in 1986-88
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Models of policy under stochastic replanning
This paper considers a policy environment in which policy is not set by a single policymaker, but by a sequence of policymaking administrations. Administration turnover is determined by a simple random process. The consequences of administration turnover are traced through for two versions of a linear rational expectations model, and numerical simulations of various policy environments are presented.
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Monetary targeting in a dynamic macro model
The consequences of a straightforward monetary targeting scheme are examined for a simple dynamic macro model. The notion of ?targeting? used is the strategic one introduced by Rogoff (1985). Numerical calculations are used to demonstrate that for the model under consideration, monetary targeting is likely to lead to a deterioration of policy performance. These examples cast doubt upon the general efficacy of simple targeting schemes in dynamic rational expectations models.
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Solution of linear-quadratic- Gaussian dynamic games using variational methods
Methods are presented for solving a certain class of rational expectations models, principally those that arise from dynamic games. The methods allow for numerical solution using spectral factorization algorithms and for estimation of these models using maximum likelihood techniques.