Before the era of large central bank balance sheets, banks relied on incoming payments to fund outgoing payments in order to conserve scarce liquidity. Even in the era of large central bank balance sheets, rather than funding payments with abundant reserve balances, we show that outgoing...

Although recent research suggests that intergenerational transfers play an important role in aggregate capital accumulation, our understanding of bequest motives remains incomplete. We develop a simple model of"exchange-motivated" bequests, in which a testator influences the decisions ofhis...

We estimate the private benefits for Uber riders from using alternative payment methods. We focus on Mexico where riders have the option to use cash or credit cards to pay for rides. We use three field experiments involving approximately 400,000 riders to estimate the loss of private benefits...

The literature on networks suggests that the value of a network is positively affected by the number of geographically dispersed locations it serves (the "network effect") and the number of its users (the "production scale effect"). We show that as a result a firm's expected time until adoption...

This paper analyzes the financing terms that support international trade and sheds light on how and why these arrangements affect trade. Using detailed transaction level data from a U.S. based exporter of frozen and refrigerated food products, primarily poultry, it begins by describing broad...