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Working Paper
Voting on social security: evidence from OECD countries
An examination of the subset of public choice models for Social Security that have empirical implications. The data, collected from OECD countries for the years 1960, 1970, 1980 and 1990, show that higher median voter age, greater income heterogeneity, similarity in family size, and variables that make a public pension program profitable are all associated with a larger program.
Journal Article
Global ATM banking: casting the net
ACH and ATM systems are examples of networks, where the benefits of one participant enhance the structure's value for the other participants. Some recent results from economic theory suggest that competitive networks are preferable in a social sense to monopoly networks.
Journal Article
Excess Reserves: Oceans of Cash
Journal Article
FOMC communications and the predictability of near-term policy decisions
In February 1994, the FOMC began a new era in transparency, gradually building a communications apparatus that conveys information about the Committee?s decisions and expectations. Has the new apparatus improved the public?s ability to predict FOMC interest rate decisions? New research based on the prices of fed funds futures shows that over the past decade, it has, especially over horizons of two to three months.
Working Paper
Gross loan flows
We present a series of stylized facts about gross loan flows and how they vary over time, bank size, and region. We define loan creation as the sum of the change in bank loans at all banks that increased loans since last quarter. Loan destruction is similarly defined as the absolute value of the change in loans at all banks that decreased loans. The gross flow (akin to what the labor literature calls reallocation) is the sum of creation and destruction.
Discussion Paper
Inflation and welfare: a search approach
This paper extends recent findings in the search-theoretic literature on monetary exchange regarding the welfare costs of inflation. We present first estimates of the welfare cost of inflation using the "welfare triangle" methodology of Bailey (1958) and Lucas (2000). We then derive a money demand function from the search-theoretic model of Lagos and Wright (2005) and we estimate it from U.S. data over the period 1900-2000. We show that the welfare cost of inflation predicted by the model accords with the welfare-triangle measure when pricing mechanisms are such that buyers appropriate ...
Working Paper
Substitution between net and gross settlement systems: A concern for financial stability?
While net settlement systems make more efficient use of liquidity than gross settlement systems, they are known to generate systemic risk. What does that tendency imply for the stability of the payments (or financial) system when the two settlement systems coexist? Do liquidity shortages induce banks to settle more transactions in the net settlement system, thereby increasing systemic risk? Or do banks require their counterparties to send payments through the gross settlement system when default risks are high, increasing the need for liquidity and the money market rate but reducing overall ...
Working Paper
Interbank tiering and money center banks
Interbank markets are tiered rather than flat, in the sense that many banks do not lend to each other directly but through money center banks which act as intermediaries. This paper captures the notion of tiering by designing a core-periphery model and develops a procedure for fitting an empirical network to this model. We find strong evidence of tiering for the German banking system, using bilateral interbank exposures among 1,800 banks. Moreover, bank-specific features, such as bank size, help explain how banks position themselves in the interbank market, suggesting that models with ...
Journal Article
The Federal Funds Market since the Financial Crisis
Before the financial crisis, the federal funds market was a market in which domestic commercial banks with excess reserves would lend funds overnight to other commercial banks with temporary shortfalls in liquidity. What has happened to this market since the financial crisis? Though the banking system has been awash in reserves and the federal funds rate has been near zero, the market has continued to operate, but it has changed. Different institutions now participate. Government-sponsored enterprises such as the Federal Home Loan Banks loan funds, and foreign commercial banks borrow.