An analysis of the potential effects of three recent proposals for pricing Federal Reserve daylight overdrafts, demonstrating that reducing the attendant moral hazard in daylight overdraft credit depends on how, rather than on how much, pricing affects overdrafts, and that this should be a...

An examination of the cost of providing check-processing services at 47 Federal Reserve offices between 1983:1Q and 1990:IVQ, demonstrating how the Fed's unit cost measures can be decomposed into separate effects related to differences in cost efficiency, output mix, input prices, and...

Payment finality is critical to decentralized exchange. By specifying how the transfer of one type of claim extinguishes another, the rules governing finality minimize opportunities for default along credit chains and allocate other risks. ; The authors provide a basic analysis of finality and...

The history of money is marked by innovations that have expanded the role of "inside money"-money created by the private sector. For instance, the past few years have seen the development of several types of on-line payment arrangements, some of which have been dubbed "on-line currencies." ;...

Recent market developments have heightened concerns about the potential for systemic risk in the payments system. At the same time that markets are becoming more integrated and global in scope, they are becoming more segmented in the sense that there is a growing separation evolving between the...

Most people are familiar with retail payments systems such as checks and credit cards. Less familiar are wholesale payments systems, which consist of electronic networks used for sending large sums among banks. A feature common to all wholesale networks is that settlement is carried out by...

There is little agreement on even the rudimentary definitions of a financial crisis, the sequence of events constituting a crisis, or the causes of these events. This article investigates the various theories of financial panics and crises with particular emphasis on the links between credit and...

Since the Great Depression, the Fed has historically intervened during potential financial crises to ensure that financial market participants were provided with the liquidity necessary to complete their transactions. In recent years, this part of the Fed's role in the payments system has come...

Each year, hundreds of millions of credit and debit cardholders make billions of transactions worth trillions of dollars. Yet few consumers are aware that such transactions travel through, and are made possible by a highly evolved group of intermediaries that sign up merchants to accept cards,...