New technologies used in payment methods can reduce risk, but they can also lead to new risks. Emerging retail payments are prone to operational and fraud risks, especially security breaches and potential use in illicit transactions. This article describes an economic framework for understanding...

New technologies used in payment methods can reduce risk, but they can also lead to new risks. Emerging retail payments are prone to operational and fraud risks, especially security breaches and potential use in illicit transactions. This article describes an economic framework for understanding...

Checks continue to dominate the market for noncash retail payments in the United States. Each year, U.S. residents write between 65 billion and 70 billion checks, an average of one check per business day per resident. This dependence on checks is unique among developed countries. It is also...

The medieval banks of continental Europe facilitated trade by serving as payment intermediaries. Depositors commonly would pay one another by transferring bank balances with the aid of overdraft credit. We model this process in an environment of intermediate good exchange with incomplete...

Households and businesses in the U.S. prefer to use check payment over less costly, electronic means of payment. Earlier studies have focused on check “float,” i.e., the time lag between receipt and clearing, as a potential explanation for the continued popularity of checks. An underlying...

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...

In this paper, we consider the costs and benefits of transactions privacy. In the environment we consider, privacy is the concealment of potentially useful information, but concealment also potentially bestows benefits. In some versions of the environment, the standard Coasian logic applies:...