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...

Since the mid-1990s, the U.S. payment system has been undergoing a transformation featuring a significant decline in the use of paper checks that has been quite uneven across consumers and not well understood. This paper estimates econometric models of consumers' adoption (extensive margin) and...

Though checks' popularity is now waning in favor of electronic payments, checks were, for much of the twentieth century, the most widely used noncash payment method in the United States. How did such a relatively inefficient form of payment become so dominant? This article traces the historical...

Contemporary bank governance is criticized for manager-dominated (insider) boards of directors, but from the beginning of the nineteenth century, bank presidents appear also to have operated as chairmen of the boards of directors. However, the managers were constrained by a variety of rules that...

Following the adoption by the Basel Committee of new capital rules for banks, a process is now taking place in the EU to transpose the rules into Community law and, ultimately, into national legislation. This paper gives an overview of the main issues that relate to the EU implementation, mainly...

Mit den Beschlüssen zur europäischen Regulierung im Dezember 2012 hat die EU einen Schritt in Richtung Bankenunion gemacht. Nach Ansicht von Sabine Lautenschläger, Deutsche Bundesbank, braucht Europa Zeit, um eine europäische Bankenaufsicht und einen europäischen Abwicklungsmechanismus auf...

Markus Demary, Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft Köln, plädiert für eine zweigeteilte Einführung der Bankenunion, für ausreichend kapitalisierte und für unterkapitalisierte Banken. Letztere sollten der EZB Restrukturierungspläne vorlegen, die diese genehmigen muss. Eine Abwicklung sollte...

In the first part (in the previous issue of Economic Review) of this two-part study, the authors identified a number of possible benefits from combining banking and commerce, including portfolio diversification, the creation of internal capital markets, and economies of scale and scope. This...