Remarks at the Central Bank Independence Conference—Progress and Challenges in Mexico, Mexico City, Mexico.

Remarks at the Central Bank Independence Conference—Progress and Challenges in Mexico, Mexico City, Mexico.

Given estimates of shipping costs and scale economies for high-speed currency sorting, the authors investigate whether the Federal Reserve might lower its costs by reallocating the volume of sorting among its processing sites.

The conversion of U.S. Treasury securities from physical to book-entry form was a major event in the history of the Treasury market. The conversion, which began in 1966, resulted in an automated system that has greatly reduced market operating costs and risks. This article examines the origins...

In the past decade, the U.S. economy has witnessed a tremendous surge in the usage of electronic payment processing services and an increased importance of the firms that provide these services. The payments industry has also undergone changes in cost structure with the introduction of new...

Could the Federal Reserve lower its overall currency processing costs by reallocating its high-speed currency sorting volume? Given estimates of currency shipping costs and scale economies for high-speed sorting, the authors’ model minimizes costs by optimal distribution of sorting volumes...

Meeting the currency demands of depository institutions, businesses, and consumers costs the Federal Reserve more than half a billion dollars each year, yet, very little research has been devoted to understanding what factors affect such costs. The authors estimate a cost function in order to...

Because the automated clearinghouse (ACH) has been found to have lower social costs than paper checks, the Federal Reserve has been promoting more widespread use of ACH by lowering ACH processing fees. In this paper we have obtained the first numerical estimates of ACH demand elasticities, a...