In a modern economy, the payment system is a major component of the country's infrastructure system. Indeed, no country nowadays can afford to take its payment system for granted. Advances in information technology and changes in laws, institutions and regulations in some countries have...

Central banks have become increasingly worried about systemic risks to the financial market and infrastructure stemming from payment systems. Failure to settle by a participant in a netting system can potentially jeopardize the settlement of other participants. The fear of a systemic crisis has...

Elektronisches Geld stellt die (vorerst) neueste Innovation im Bereich des Zahlungsverkehrs dar. Inwieweit sich aus seiner Verbreitung Konsequenzen für die Geldpolitik ergeben, hängt nicht zuletzt davon ab, in welchem Umfang elektronisches Geld vom Publikum tatsächlich zu Zahlungszwecken...

Electronic money constitutes (for the time being) the most recent innovation in payment instruments. The extent to which the further spread of electronic money might have consequences for monetary policy depends not least on the actual demand for electronic money. Numerous studies have sought to...

This paper investigates the impact on the network growth of the level of merchant discount, the level of Multilateral Interchange Fee (MIF), and the consumers' and the merchants' awareness of positive network effects. In an artificial market, in which issuers and acquirers belong to the same...

Empirically, compensation systems generate substantial effort despite weak monetary incentives. We consider reciprocal motivations as a source of incentives. We solve for the optimal contract in the basic principal-agent problem and show that reciprocal motivations and explicit performance-based...

Proponents of the so-called New Economy claim that it entails a structural change of the economy. Such a change, in turn, would require the central bank to rethink its monetary policy to the extent that traditional relationships between inf1ation and economic growth are no longer valid. But such...

This paper documents the recent performance of European electronic purses. It presents data on 16 such schemes, and compares their penetration and usage rates. These rates are shown to differ substantially. A number of schemes are doing increasingly well and in all probability are here to stay....

While net settlement systems make more efficient use of liquidity than gross settlement systems, they are known to generate systemic risk. What does that tendency imply for the stability of the payments [or financial] system when the two settlement systems coexist? Do liquidity shortages induce...