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Report
The 2014 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice: Technical Appendix
This document serves as the technical appendix to the 2014 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice administered by the RAND Corporation. The Survey of Consumer Payment Choice (SCPC) is an annual study designed primarily to collect data on attitudes to and use of various payment instruments by consumers over the age of 18 in the United States. The main report, which introduces the survey and discusses the principal economic results, can be found at http://www.bostonfed.org/economic/cprc/SCPC. In this data report, we detail the technical aspects of the survey design, implementation, and analysis.
Report
Our payments system: challenges and opportunities. 1997 Annual report of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
An essay that considers the rapid transformation of payments systems as well as the challenges and opportunities facing its participants, including the Federal Reserve.
Report
Congestion and cascades in payment systems
We develop a parsimonious model of the interbank payment system to study congestion and the role of liquidity markets in alleviating congestion. The model incorporates an endogenous instruction arrival process, scale-free topology of payments between banks, fixed total liquidity that limits banks' capacity to process arriving instructions, and a global market that distributes liquidity. We find that at low liquidity, the system becomes congested and payment settlement loses correlation with payment instruction arrival, becoming coupled across the network. The onset of congestion is evidently ...
Discussion Paper
Anatomy of the Bank Runs in March 2023
Runs have plagued the banking system for centuries and returned to prominence with the bank failures in early 2023. In a traditional run—such as depicted in classic photos from the Great Depression—depositors line up in front of a bank to withdraw their cash. This is not how modern bank runs occur: today, depositors move money from a risky to a safe bank through electronic payment systems. In a recently published staff report, we use data on wholesale and retail payments to understand the bank run of March 2023. Which banks were run on? How were they different from other banks? And how ...
Briefing
Should Central Banks Worry About Facebook's Diem and Alibaba's Alipay?
Alibaba — an e-commerce platform in China similar to Amazon — has created its own payment system (Alipay) to provide currency-like services: facilitating transactions, supporting peer-to-peer transfers and paying interest. Platforms like Facebook and Amazon are also researching creating their own digital currencies, but so far they have relied primarily on existing payment methods. What drives platforms to develop their own digital currency rather than use existing cash and card options? And should central banks and financial regulators worry about platforms issuing their own currency?