The recent decline in the Federal Reserve's check volumes has received a lot of attention. Although switching to electronic payments methods and electronic checkprocessing has been credited for much of that decline, some of it could be caused by changes following bank mergers involving Federal...

We seek to analyze the extent and sources of network externalities for the automated clearinghouse (ACH) electronic payments system using a quarterly panel data set on individual bank adoption and usage of ACH. We provide three methods to identify network externalities using this panel data. The...