Liquidity-Saving Mechanisms

We study the incentives of participants in a real-time gross settlement system with and without the addition of a liquidity-saving mechanism (queue). Participants in our model face a liquidity shock and different costs for delaying payments. They trade off the cost of delaying a payment against the cost of borrowing liquidity from the central bank. The heterogeneity of participants in our model gives rise to a rich set of strategic interactions. The main contribution of our paper is to show that the design of a liquidity-saving mechanism has important implications for welfare, even in the absence of netting. In particular, we find that parameters will determine whether the addition of a liquidity-saving mechanism increases or decreases welfare