What are the benefits provided by a payment system? What are the trade-offs in public versus private payment systems and in restricted versus open payments arrangements? Modern payment systems encompass a variety of institutional designs with varying degrees of counterparty protection. We...

Daily data on short-term interest rates are used to show how changes in Federal Reserve operating procedures have affected the term structure. Yield spreads were helpful in predicting short-term interest-rate movements during the nonborrowed reserves targeting period (1979-82) but not during the...

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 their portfolios under net settlement. By modeling the trading economy that generates...

We examine whether transactable forms of privately issued, demandable debt are better used as "banknotes" or "checks." The distinction between the two is that a check must be redeemed by the issuing bank with each use whereas a banknote can circulate. We find that the answer to the question...

In this paper, the authors analyze statistical properties of the monetary base, M1, and M2 for the postwar U.S. data record. The authors are specifically interested in answering three policy-related questions. First, to what extent do these monetary aggregates contain information useful for...