The quantity of reserves in the U.S. banking system has risen dramatically since September 2008. Some commentators have expressed concern that this pattern indicates that the Federal Reserve's liquidity facilities have been ineffective in promoting the flow of credit to firms and households....

In this paper, we argue that the observed difference in the cost of intraday and overnight liquidity is part of an optimal payments system design. In our environment, the interest charged on overnight liquidity affects output, while the cost of intraday liquidity only affects the distribution of...

This paper studies an overlapping generations economy with capital where limited communication and stochastic relocation create an endogenous transactions role for fiat money. We assume a production function with a knowledge externality (Romer-style) that nests economies with endogenous growth...

The amount of reserves held by the U.S. banking system reached $1.5 trillion in April 2011. Some economists argue that such a large quantity of bank reserves could lead to overly expansive bank lending as the economy recovers, regardless of the Federal Reserve's interest rate policy. In...

To combat the financial crisis that intensified in the fall of 2008, the Federal Reserve injected a substantial amount of liquidity into the banking system. The resulting increase in reserve balances exerted downward price pressure in the federal funds market, and the effective federal funds...

This article designs a framework for evaluating the causes, consequences, and future implications of financial services industry consolidation, reviews the extant research literature within the context of this framework (over 250 references), and suggests fruitful avenues for future research....

The medieval banks of continental Europe facilitated trade by serving as payment intermediaries. Depositors commonly would pay one another by transferring bank balances with the aid of overdraft credit. We model this process in an environment of intermediate good exchange with incomplete...

Previous comparative analyses of gross and net settlement have focused on the credit risk of the central counterparty in net settlement arrangements, and on the incentives for participants to alter the risk of the portfolio under net settlement. By modeling the trading economy that generates the...

We study liquidity and systemic risk in high-value payment systems. Flows in high-value systems are characterized by high velocity, meaning that the total amount paid and received is high relative to the stock of reserves. In such systems, banks rely heavily on incoming funds to finance outgoing...

This paper considers the welfare effects of introducing a liquidity-saving mechanism (LSM) in a real-time gross settlement (RTGS) payment system. We study the planner's problem to get a better understanding of the economic role of an LSM and find that an LSM can achieve the planner's allocation...