The market for central bank reserves is mainly over-the-counter and exhibits a core-periphery network structure. This paper develops a model of relationship lending in the unsecured interbank market. In equilibrium, a tiered lending network arises endogenously as banks choose to build...

Should a central bank digital currency (CBDC) be issued? Should its design be cash- or depositlike? To answer these questions, we theoretically and quantitatively assess the effects of a CBDC on consumption, banking and welfare. Our model introduces new general equilibrium linkages across...

This paper builds a model with imperfect competition in the banking sector. In the model, banks issue deposits and make loans, and deposits can be used as payment instruments by households. We use the model to assess the general equilibrium effects of introducing a central bank digital currency...

Payments systems play a fundamental role in an economy by providing the mechanisms through which payments arising from transactions can be settled. The existing literature on the economics of payments systems is large but loosely organized, in that each model uses a distinct set-up and sometimes...

This paper develops a model of settlement system to study the endogenous structure of settlement networks, and the welfare consequences of clearing agent failure. The equilibrium degree of tiering is endogenously determined by the cost structure and the information structure. The degree of...

What makes e-money more special than cash? Is the introduction of e-money necessarily welfare enhancing? Is an e-money system necessarily stable? What is the optimal way to design an efficient and stable e-money scheme? This paper provides a first attempt to develop a micro-founded, dynamic,...

Recent years have witnessed the advances of e-money systems such as Bitcoin, PayPal and various forms of stored-value cards. This paper adopts a mechanism design approach to identify some essential features of different payment systems that implement and improve the constrained optimal resource...

This paper develops a search-theoretic model to study the interaction between banking and monetary policy and how this interaction affects the allocation and welfare. Regarding how banking affects the welfare costs of inflation: First, we find that, with banking, inflation generates smaller...

This paper studies the effects of monetary policy in an inventory theoretic model of money demand. In this model, agents keep inventories of money, despite the fact that money is dominated in rate of return by interest bearing assets, because they must pay a fixed cost to transfer funds between...

We present a model of central bank collateralized lending to study the optimal choice of the haircut policy. We show that a lending facility provides a bundle of two types of insurance: insurance against liquidity risk as well as insurance against downside risk of the collateral. Setting a...