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...

Declining R&D intensities at the national level coincide with growing international technological links. Deviations of individual OECD countries from the average R&D intensity reflect differences in industry structure as well as in sectoral R&D intensity. At the same time, the sectoral...

Efficiencies have yet not played a prominent role in American merger enforcement policy, although the federal antitrust agencies and the courts have recognized efficiencies as a factor in merger analysis that may tilt the balance in an otherwise anticompetitive transaction. A review of the...

When I wrote my book on EMU four years ago (Kenen 1995), very little had been written on the international dimensions of EMU There was a chapter in the Commission's path-breaking study (European Commission, 1990). There were papers by Alogoskoufis and Portes (1991, 1992), Cooper (1992), Goodhart...

The paper presents a theory of the demand for money that combines a special case of the shopping time exchange economy with the cash-in-advance framework. The model predicts that both higher inflation and financial innovation - that reduces the cost of credit - induce agents to substitute away...

This paper proposes a model of the US unemployment rate which accounts for both its asymmetry and its long memory. Our approach, based on the tests of Robinson (1994), introduces fractional integration and nonlinearities simultaneously into the same framework (unlike earlier studies employing a...

Variations of bilateral aid flows are difficult to explain on the basis of official development objectives or recipient need. At the example of US aid to Pakistan, this paper suggests alternative political economic explanations, notably the relevance of ethnic lobbying and the relevance of US...

On January 1,1999 euro became the currency for 11 member states of the European Union. Since then the dollar-euro exchange rate has completed a full turning. Three years of depreciation of the euro followed by three years of appreciation without wild fluctuations asks for an explanation which...