Search Results
Journal Article
Reducing Federal Reserve float
Working Paper
Why doesn’t technology flow from rich to poor countries?
What is the role of a country?s financial system in determining technology adoption? To examine this, a dynamic contract model is embedded into a general equilibrium setting with competitive intermediation. The terms of finance are dictated by an intermediary?s ability to monitor and control a firm?s cash flow, in conjunction with the structure of the technology that the firm adopts. It is not always profitable to finance promising technologies. A quantitative illustration is presented where financial frictions induce entrepreneurs in India and Mexico to adopt less-promising ventures than in ...
Working Paper
Who holds cash? and why?
Cash holdings of nonfinancial firms range widely, and are related to firm size, industry and access to the public bond market. Cash holdings are positively correlated with agency proxies, suggesting that firms that cannot borrow easily due to agency problems hold greater cash stocks--perhaps as a cushion to prevent shortfalls in cash flow from impinging on investment. However, this correlation holds only for the very highest cash holders, especially small firms. The group of afflicted firms appears to be less than one-quarter of COMPUSTAT firms. Agency proxies are irrelevant for a large ...
Journal Article
Shopping without cash: the emergence of the e-purse
This article finds that successful e-purse programs tend to have a captive audience that drives critical mass, such as those found in the transportation industry or government sector; an affordable cost structure relative to other payment instruments; compelling incentives for consumers and merchants; and technology that is well tested and addresses standards issues before rollout.
Journal Article
Why are corporations holding so much cash?
U.S. corporations are holding record-high amounts of cash. One reason has to do with taxes?both the uncertainty about future taxes and the reality of today?s tax rules. The second reason has to do with the rise of research and development; because of its uncertain nature, this sort of work requires access to high levels of cash.
Journal Article
The sales tax crunch
Newsletter
Corporate Cash Flow and Its Uses
We decompose corporate cash flow into its primary components to examine how funds are being internally allocated and to elucidate current trends in corporate behavior. By historical standards, capital investment has been low and shareholder payouts have been high over the past few years, although these patterns do not seem so abnormal once recent economic and financial conditions are factored in. That said, corporate debt levels are now somewhat higher than we would expect given the rather tepid economic recovery from the Great Recession.
Working Paper
The evolution of cash transactions : some implications for monetary policy
This paper considers the implications for monetary policy of a decreasing demand for outside money. It finds that even perpetual declines in the demand for base money pose no threat to the traditional methods employed for conducting monetary policy. The effects of such reductions in the demand for central bank liabilities, however, do depend on how monetary policy is conducted. Four monetary policy regimes are analyzed. With a policy of nominal-interest-rate targeting, a secular decline in the volume of cash transactions unambiguously leads to accelerating inflation. A policy of maintaining a ...